


•«2i 














4C«MH 


"c'c 








a 











E^ 



OF CONGRESS 



FK^^ 







C3C^ 





'i 
I 




4 


^ 


_1 


• f 


•i 




t 


A\ 















CC-- ■ ■ ■'•«?:? "^<-'^^- ' 






Cf^cv «C.c- • ^: <■ C 
ICCC <i. ^ <^ C' 






ccr <L <3r v< 









^■^^-^^'^ 






e< 5: <^ J^ 









c: c c 
- <<rc<^^v *~g^ fee''' 



:::. ,^<:/ <t/«^ « 






/ 



u / 



Among My Books. 



He that loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome coun- 
eellor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, 
by thinkinj^, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as 
in all weathers, so iti all fortunes.— Barrow. 

When this bundle of egotisms is bound up together, as they may be one 
day, if no accident prevents this tongue from wagging, or this ink from 
running, they will bore you, very likely ; so it would to read through " Ilowell's 
Letters" from beginning to end, or to eat up the whole of a ham : but a slice 
on occasion may have a relish: a dip into the volume at random, and 
so on for a page or two : and now and then a smile ; and presently a gape ; 
and the book drops out of your hand; and so, Sow soir, and pleasant dreama 
to you.— Thackerat. 



('1 



-%^ 




NEW YOEK: 
E. J. HALE & SON, PUBLISHERS, 

MUREAY STREET. 
1871. 







Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by 

E. J. HALE & SON, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



^ 



yVlr JOUNG pAUGHTER, 

COMPANION OF THE LONELY HOURS WHEN 
THESE ESSAYS WERE WRITTEN, 

THIS VOLUME 

IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Swift 13 

bolingbroke 31 

Clarendon 37 

Junius 33 

Quotation Books 40 

Books of Travel 55 

Memories op the East 6G 

The Prayer Book 77 

Autographs 90 

William Cobbett 105 

Blackstone 119 

Sermons — Barrow to Manning 139 

The Napiers 14G 

The Stuart Books 155 

The Theatre 169 

Novels — Defoe to Thackeray 183 

Thackeray 199 

Walter Scott 313 

Lord Palmerston 335 

American History 838 

Henry Reed 356 



Il^TEODUOTIOI^. 



These Essays were meant to be purely fugitive, and 
the idea of their being collected in a volume never 
entered the writer's mind till it was suggested and 
kindly urged by those near and at a distance to whom 
he was personally a stranger. In this form they need 
a word of preface. The student will find in them 
nothing new. All that they are designed to effect is to 
freshen the dim memories of familiar books, and what- 
ever merit they have is their success in doing this — no 
more. It is a very slender bundle of literary egotisms. 
They have accidentally the same title as one of Mr. 
Lowell's productions; but while his volume relates 
only to three or four books or writers, these memories 
float round and grasp, in perhaps a feeble way, many 
more. Such as they are, they are submitted diffi- 
dently to the public judgment. The volume is too 
slight to bear the burden of notes and authorities, 
and they are as a general rule omitted. If errors are 
detected, it should be borne in mind that it is the 
memory rather than the contact with books these crit- 



8 INTRODUCTION. 

icisms are meant to represent. It would be great 
ingratitude were the expression of thanks to be 
omitted to the Editor of the Neio Yorh World, 
through whose kindness these little essays found their 
way to the public, and their author was encouraged 
to continue them. 



Among My Books. 



When" Southey, at the end of life, fell into mental 
decay, he used to walk around his libraiy, take book 
after book from the shelves, look at the binding and 
titles, and, without the ability to read, seem to com- 
mune with them as with old friends on the edge of 
separation. I am becoming an old man now, but I 
hope not childish, and, looking at my books, the accu- 
mulation of some forty years, the melancholy feeling 
comes over me that we, before long, shall have to part. 
Let me, then, with no parade of learning, jot down 
some thoughts on these familiar volumes, not grouped 
in regular or scientific order, and read with quite as 
little method. In other words, without preface or 
promise, my idea is to write my thoughts on books — 
an American student's rambling notes on the prose 
literature of his mother-tongue — and that student, not 
a technical scholar, but a professional man, who has 
always had to work hard for a living, and now, when 
life is nearly over, finds all that is left to him is the 
memory of books. 



SWIFT. 



What is the strange fascination of this most repul- 
sive being, and, in the common sense of the word, 
unattractive writer ? Bead his life, as told by him- 
self and others, and you find nothing that can be 
called winning, and yet Bolingbroke, and Harley, and 
Pope, and Arbuthnot were fond of him, and Stella and 
Vanessa loved him dearly. From the time when, as a 
boy, I read Gulliver and believed it, till relatively late 
in life. Swift was one of my postponed studies; and 
yet so entangled did I at last become in the vague 
fascination to which I have alluded, that, on reaching 
Dublin, years ago, my first visit was to St. Patrick's 
Cathedral to look at the Dean's " fearful bust," and as 
fearful epitaph, the 

" Ubi soeva indignatio, 
TJlterius cor lacerare nequit," 

and poor Stella's tombstone alongside; and, had I 
known it then, should have gone to see the plaster cast 
taken after death, which Sir Walter Scott describes as 
at Trinity College — " with the unequivocally maniacal 
expression of countenance, and the left side of the 
mouth horribly contorted downward, as if convulsed 
by pain." I was tempted to make a pilgrimage to 
Laracor. Why all this, in one who disavows admira- 



SWIFT. 13 

tion of Swift, it is not easy to say. Must it not be the 
influence of the bright association which shone around 
him, and which is so charmingly illustrated in the 
letters, rather to him, than from him ? As, when 
Bolingbroke writes in 1730: "Pope is now in the 
library with me, and writes to the world, to the present 
and to future ages, while I begin this letter, which he 
is to finish, to you." There is a note in Scott's Swift, 
of Bowles, on this subject : " These letters of Boling- 
broke, of Pope, and of Swift, which almost set us 
among the very persons who wrote them, create a 
melancholy interest. We hear of their acquaintances, 
friends, pursuits, studies, as if we knew them; we see 
the process of years and infirmities, and follow them 
through the gradations from youth to age, from hope 
to disappointment, and partake of their feelings, their 
partialities, aversions, hopes, and sorrows, till all is 
dust and silence." The centre, as Swift seems to have 
been, of this circle of companionship, could not fail to 
magnetize any one. 

The most painful, hideous narrative is the " Journal 
to Stella ;" not so much in its nasty details (for, as 
Mr. Thackeray says, " he was filthy in word, filthy in 
thought, furious, raging, obscene"), as in the revela- 
tions of the temper of the man, and the cruelty of 
making them to a gentlewoman. His very conviviality 
seems grim, and it is with a smile, rather at the Quaker 
than the Dean that we read : " Called at Mr. Har- 
ley's. The porter told me his master was just gone to 
dinner with much company, and desired I would come 
an hour hence, which I did, expecting to hear Mr. 
Harley was gone out; but they had just done dinner. 



14 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

Mr, Harley came out to me, brought me in, and pre- 
sented me to his son-in-law, Lord Dublane, and his 
own son, and among others, to Will Penn, the Quaker; 
and we sate two hours drinking as good wine as you 
do ; and two hours he and I were alone." But night 
and bedtime coming, then "I come home, rolling 
resentment in my mind, and forming schemes of re- 
venge, full of Avhich, having written down some hints, 
I go to bed." This was his court-life when he Avas a 
Tory leader, managing rival statesmen and guiding 
policy. Then it Avas, he laid his head upon a thorny 
jjillow, having dispatched, daily or weekly, packets of 
nettles to sting poor Esther Johnson. This was in 
1710, and, by way of contrast — though the so&va indig- 
natio burns up there too — note Avhat he Avas proud of, 
twenty years later, in exile, and seclusion, and decay, 
when Stella Avas dead, and he had no companion, a 
deaf, remorseful, proud old man, "the lonely eagle 
chained behind the bars." What he was then proud 
of, this letter tells: "My popularity," he writes to 
Pope, in 1730, "is wholly confined to the common 
people, who are more constant than those Ave miscall 
their betters. I walk the streets, and so do my lower 
friends, from whom, and from Avhom alone, I have a 
thousand hats and blessings upon old scores, Avhich 
those Ave call the gentry have forgot. But I have not 
the love, or hardly the civility, of any one man in 
power or station, and I can boast that I neither visit 
nor am acquainted with any 'lord temporal or spiritual' 
in the Avhole kingdom." It is on this letter that Dr. 
Warton has the following note: "We see in it the steps 
by which this great genius sank into discontent, into 



SWIFT. 15 

peevishness, into indignity {sic), into torpor, into inr 
sanity." It may show discontent and peevishness, bnt 
surely there are no signs of torpor. The last fall of 
intellect was very sudden, for the best, the clearest, 
tlie most agreeable of all Swift's letters are those after 
1736, when he was complaining of a "total want of 
memory." It Avas not when at home in Ireland, with 
the common people taking off" their hats to him as 
they passed, but in London, within the bright radiance 
of Queen Anne's court, that he used to have the third 
chapter of Job read to him on his birthday, and think 
of " the kings and counsellors of the land Avhich build 
desolate places for themselves." 

If a student, led by a stray impulse, will read Swift's 
life and writings from an American point of view, he 
will find not a little of peculiar interest. His biogra- 
pher says, though the authority is not given, that 
about the year 1707, when Swift was a Whig and a 
friend of Addison and Lord Somcrs, it was proposed 
he should accompany Governor Hunter to America, 
and be consecrated " Bishop of Virginia." Now, had 
Swift, with his turbulent spirit, come to these colonies, 
what a course might his have been, and how different 
his fame, had the eloquence which was in him been 
evoked on this stage — a nation, not a party, to applaud 
the swelling act — instead of the narrow one of Dublin 
politics ; but the offer of such a mitred exile was too 
closely kin to insult to be submitted to. If made, it 
was, no doubt, contemptuously declined; and it is 
curious to see what he and others of his day (the 
golden age of English literature) thought of us Ameri- 
cans, and, as we may infer, of such a diocese. Viudi- 



16 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

eating the people of Ireland from some metropolitan 
grievance, he breaks out, as if unable to control the 
insolence of his spirit, and the utter scorn with which 
an Englishman of those days looked down upon us : 
" It is clear that some Ministers are apt to look from 
their high elevation on this kingdom of Ireland as if it 
were only one of our colonies of outcasts in America." 
Thus spoke the Irish ecclesiastic of those days, reflect- 
ing the popular sentiment of the times ; and may not 
the American student find something, even here, worthy 
of a moment's complacent meditation ? In little over 
a century from the time these words of scorn were 
uttered by one of England's wisest men, an American 
frigate, chartered by the charity of these very outcasts, 
lay at anchor in the Cove of Cork, dispensing bounty 
to save Ireland from starvation, and the royal standard 
of a Queen ten times more powerful and a thousand 
times more queenlike than Queen Anne, gracefully 
and gratefully saluted American grain-ships hasten- 
ing through the Irish Channel on an errand of mercy 
to her subjects,* 

Scorning, or unable, to secure an American mitre, 
thwarted by the antipathy of the Queen, who never 
forgave " The Tale of a Tub," Swift took refuge in 
an Irish deanery ; and then it was, that, thrust in exile 
among a people he detested, he wrote the political 
works which have immortalized his name. He wrote 
the "Drapier's Letters," to arouse Ireland, not merely 
against Wood's half-pence, but their principle ; against 



* A graceful account of this charity will be found in Miss Seaton's 
charming " Biographical Sketch" of her father, recently issued. 



SWIFT. 17 

oppression which legishited for her without her con- 
sent; taxed her, cut off her manufactures, restricted 
her commerce, screwed tighter that great engine of 
imperial tyranny, the Navigation act ; in short (and 
this is the application), did everything to Ireland 
which, forty years later, made the American Eevolu- 
tion. If ever history suggests a prototype, here it is ; 
the chief difference being, that Sir Robert Walpole was 
wiser than George Grenville, and Ireland, not America. 
The student, reading Swift's almost forgotten vol- 
umes in an American spirit, will realize all this; and 
here, in the dark perplexity of Irish politics, from 
which, then and now, every one shrinks, will be found 
a germ of the mighty struggle which created this 
republic. The statutes which, for years, oppressed 
America, and which, quite as much as the speculative 
question of taxation, led to the overthrow of imperial 
power here, were resisted in Ireland. The machinery 
of resistance too — non-importation, and non-consump- 
tion — was the same. Some of Swift's very phrases, 
their origin probably not traced, became current coin 
of American declamation, and were habitiially used 
by the pamphleteers of 1775. The common one of 
'• uniting as one man" is in the "Drapier's Letters;" 
and there, too, the student will find other sentences 
and phrases of captivating power, with the ring of 
those which, a fcAV years later, were uttered in Car- 
penter's Hall and the court-house of Williamsburg in 
defiance of the same imperial and imperious authority. 
It sounds very much like American rebellion to hear 
Swift say to Ireland : " The remedy is wholly in your 
hands, and therefore I have digressed a little in order 



18 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

to refresh and continue that spirit among you, and to 
let you see, that, by the laws of God, of nations, of 
nature, and of your country, you are and ought to be 
as free as your brethren of England." Or again, when, 
rising to a higher pitch of masculine downright elo- 
quence, his agitated spirit goaded to look toward 
these "colonies of outcasts" as the place of freedom's 
refuge, he says : " For my own part, who am but one 
man, of obscure condition, I do solemnly declare, in 
the presence of Almighty God, that I will suffer the 
most ignominious and torturing death rather than 
submit to receive this accursed coin, or any other that 
shall be liable to the same objection, until they shall 
be forced on me by a law of my own country. If that 
shall ever happen, I will transport myself into some 
foreign land and eat the bread of iwverty among a 
free people." TJiere was something very like " Brother 
Jonathan" in the tone of these remonstrances, and yet 
the courtly writer who has described these wa-ongs and 
their redress, who sees in England's commercial treat- 
ment of Ireland " nothing but a short-sighted jner- 
cantile policy, alike impolitic and cruel, more worthy 
the monopolizing corporation of a peddling borough 
than the enlightened Senate of a free people," never 
recognized in it the foreshadow of the kindred blun- 
dering which aroused American rebellion, and made 
the American Kevolution. At the time, too, few or 
none of those reputed wise, saw the progress of colonial 
misgovernment and abuse of metropolitan authority. 

But there was an observant eye that noted what wms 
happening; for, at the very period when Swift was 
hurling deliance in the lace of Walpole and liis col- 



SWIFT. 19 

leagues, and vindicating the wrongs of liis provincial 
countrymen against parliamentary oppression, there 
was a poor American printer, lodging in a by-street 
of London, who was watching the struggle closely, 
and no doubt laying up, in a mind which grasped and 
retained everything, the Dean's lessons of resistance 
for future use in a distant land. During the time 
wheii Swift was publishing the "Drapier's Letters" 
and other pamphlets in defense of Ireland, Doctor 
Franklin was, on his first visit to England, a vigilant 
and reflective watcher of the scene before him, and 
then it was that one of those odd incidents of variety 
occurred which mark his singular career and brought 
him in contact with one of the Drapier's nearest 
friends. 

"One of these days," says Franklin, "I was, to my 
surprise, sent for by a great man, I knew only by 
name. Sir William Wyndham" (all remember him as 
the Tory leader of his day, the friend of Bolingbroke, 
and patron of Swift), " and I waited uj^on him. He had 
heard, by some means or other, of my swimming from 
Chelsea to Blackfriars, and of my teaching a young 
man to swim in a few hours. He had two sons about 
to set out on their travels, and he wished to liave them 
first taught swimming, and proposed to gratify me 
handsomely if I would teach them. They were not 
yet come to town, and my stay was uncertain, so I 
could not undertake it. But from this incident I 
think it likely that if I were to remain in England 
and open a swimming school, I might get a great deal 
of money." 

When Franklin next returned to England, Swift's 



20 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

career was run ; Wyndham and Bolingbroke were 
dead ; one of the boys whom Franklin had refused to 
teach to swim was Earl of Egremont, and had suc- 
ceeded Mr. Pitt as Minister of the Crown ; and the 
muttering of a greater rebellion than Ireland had ever 
dreamed of, was audible on this side of the Atlantic. 



BOLINGBROKE, 



EvEEY student, old or young, has had his spasm of 
infidelity — a time, long or short, when he thought it 
a manly thing to be a skeptic. Mine, very long ago, 
was a slight attack, and I then read, and have now 
forgotten. Lord Bolingbroke's " Essay, or Letters, on 
History," which contains the distillation of his doubts. 
The Bible my father used to read to us — the Bible 
History (it was a certain dull one by Kempton or 
Kimpton); the homely engravings of Eoyaumont, 
which, especially one of the luckless man with a huge 
ligneous beam protruding from his eye, won the won- 
der of my childhood ; the catechism which my dear 
mother taught to me — these were my guardian influ- 
ences. There were legends of religion in the nurseries 
of those days, and in them, for me at least, there really 
" lurked a deeper import" than lay on the surface of 
truths learned later. In one of the skeptical books of 
this day, the sentimental difficulty of infidelity is hon- 
estly stated : " II faut etre bien stir de soi," says M. 
Eenan ; "pour ne point se troubler, quand les femmes 
et les enfants joigneut leur mains pour vous dire ; 
' croyez, comme nous.' " M. Kenan and his followers, 
and Hegel with his " Almighty Nothing," now poison- 
ing the minds of a large and amiable school in this 
country, and Theodore Parker, and Comte, at whose 
door, to my personal knowledge, lies one sad suicide. 



22 AMOXa MY BOOKS. 

tlie wreck of a brilliant American intellect — all these, 
no doubt, feel lofty scorn for the women's and the 
children's prayer, and say they are very sure of them- 
selves. But in their inner hearts they are not so con- 
fident as was John Wesley when he said (where it is 
recorded I cannot say) : " When I was young I was 
sure of everything. In a few years, having been mis- 
taken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most 
things as before. Now that I am an old man, I am 
hardly sure of anything lut what God has revealed to 
me" It has been said of Bolingbroke, to whom my 
rambling pen returns, that if a reader wishes to test 
the value of any of his opinions he must inquire 
whether he is thinking of Christianity or Sir Robert 
Walpole, for as to them he cannot be trusted, and my 
notes do not take me in the direction of either. 

I now read Bolingbroke's political and strictly mis- 
cellaneous writings, not only without prejudice, but 
with an enthusiasm as to their literarj merit which it 
is not easy to express. Better critics have been equally 
enthusiastic. " Until I read Bolingbroke," says Lord 
Chesterfield, " I did not know the extent and power of 
the English language." " I would have you," he writes 
to his son in 1751, "read his works over and over 
again. Transcribe, imitate, emulate if possible. It 
will be of real use to you in the House of Commons." 
His style seems to me the perfection of eloquence; 
and there is a critical theory on Bolingbroke's diction, 
hinted at by Chesterfield, which is not without signifi- 
cance in accounting for the natural, apparently unar- 
tistic, flow which characterizes it. A recent biographer, 
Mr. Macknight, says, speaking of the lost speeches for 



BOLINOBROKE. 23 

wliicli Pitt mourned : " Far more than almost any 
other man that ever wrote, St. John's literary works 
resemble spoken eloquence. They are clearly the com- 
position of an orator who, being prevented from ad- 
dressing an audience by word of mouth, uses the pen 
as his instrument, and writes what he would have 
spoken. To make this resemblance, or rather identity, 
complete, we know that Bolingbroke disliked the 
mechanical drudgery of writing ; that he could not 
bear to sit down with a paper before him and the pen 
in his hand to develope his ideas; that it was his cus- 
tom to employ an amanuensis, and to dictate many of 
his literary productions. This habit was evidently 
formed in the House of Commons; and having learned 
to make speeches before he was obliged to confine 
himself to writing essays, the author was merely a 
transcript of the orator. His compositions, when ex- 
amined, fully confirm this idea. Their style is, both 
in its excellencies and defects, thoroughly oratorical ; 
glowing, animated, and vehement, and, if never bom- 
bastic, frequently declamatory, tautological, and difi"use. 
Graceful and flowing as Bolingbroke in the best of his 
writings is, he not unfrequently tires the reader with 
repetitions and amplifications to which, Avhen set off 
by his fine person and pleasing intonations, an audi- 
ence might always listen with interest and delight. 
Any one who will give himself up to the spirit of the 
' Letter to Sir William Wyndham,' or the ' Disserta- 
tion on Parties,' can scarcely fail to form a vivid idea 
of what St, John's oratory was in the House of Com- 
mons. When he wrote, he was addressing an imaginary 
audience, exciting imaginary cheers, and frequently 



24 AMONG 3IY BOOKS. 

defying and assailing a hated rival, who was not at all 
imaginary; but, whether in youth or age, — while St. 
John, speaking in the House of Commons, or, as 
Viscount Bolingbroke, composing the letters to the 
Craftsman, — still the same unconquered and uncon- 
querable foe." 

"VVe read that, long ago, Cicero wrote at least parts 
of his Philippics as a pamphlet oration, and one can 
easily imagine the " Letter to Wyndham" to be a 
Avritten speech. It is Bolingbroke's "Apologia pro 
Vita Sua" (its venial egotism, frank confession, and 
fierce inculpation, not unlike the theological apology 
of our day), and in it we have the peculiar beauty of 
his rhetoric in all its force. See how, from time to 
time, he turns on Harley, and how proudly conscious 
he is of his own superiority as a parliamentary cliam- 
})ion. One is reminded of the octogenarian of our own 
day, not long gone to his rest, in the passage where he 
says : " In the House of Commons his [Oxford's] 
credit was low, and my reputation very higli. You 
kiiow the nature of that assembly; they groAV, like 
hounds, fond of the man who shows them game, and 
by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged." 

Every Bolingbroke student has fi'esh in his memory 
the celebrated description of the Pretender's court, 
where, as Lord Stair said in his rough, familiar way, 
"poor Harry could not play his part with a grave 
enough face; he could not help laughing at such 
kings and queens." " Care and hope," writes Boling- 
broke, "sate on every busy Irish face. Those who 
could write and read, had letters to show, and those 
who had not arrived at this pitch of erudition, had 



BOLINGBROKE. 25 

their secrets to whisper. No sex was secluded from 
this ministry. Fanny Oglethorpe, whom yoxi have 
seen in England, kept her corner in it, and Olive 
Trant was the great wheel of the machine." Then, 
too, the description of his last interview with the 
Pretender, which, using it elsewhere, I refrain from 
quoting here. 

There is a word of justice which Bolingbroke's biog- 
raphy, and especially his letters to Swift and Lord 
Marchmont, prompt. He has hardly had fair play. 
History and biography, till very lately, have been per- 
sistently Whig, and when a Tory, or prerogative man, 
like Dr. Johnson, undertook to talk of Bolingbroke, 
party sympathies were acidulated by theological re- 
sentments. (I am actually catching the Doctor's 
style.) St. John's " fell spirit"-and Mallet's " blunder- 
buss" survive when amiable and gentle traits are 
forgotten. Yet he was attractive, wonderfully so, per- 
sonally, socially, intellectually. Men were his devoted 
friends; though by a strange incongruity, while Stella 
and Vanessa were in love, desperately so, with Swift, 
Bolingbroke seems to boast of no woman's deep affec- 
tions, unless it be in his wreck, the pupil of St. Cyr, 
on whose dying bed he flung himself in an agony of 
honest grief and begged forgiveness, and who, in her 
strange French way, once told him, when he was 
boasting of former gallantries, that he reminded her 
of an "ancient aqueduct, a noble ruin, in which no 
water flowed." She clung to the ruin to the end ; and 
among the few agreeable things to be noted in Lord 
Marchmont's diary, — that dreary record of an old poli- 
tician's restlessness, — is the frequent and afiectionate 

2 



26 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

reference to his wife. The critical scholar observes in 
some of Bolingbroke's later letters the influence of his 
French wife and French residence and association on 
his diction, in such words as "coalited" and "volupty." 
But the main web is glorious, magnificent English; 
and if there be too stately a step for our ambling 
times, and grander phrases than now we use, we should 
remember that 

" Words have their proper places, just like men. 
We listen to, not venture to reprove, 
Large language, swelling under gilded domes 
Byzantine, Syrian, Persepolitan."* 

* Walter Savage Landor. 



CLARENDON. 



Let me break tlie continuity of time, and turn 
back to another century. Clarendon is not a prime 
favourite witli any one, and why, it is liard to say; but 
he is wearisome, and neither the " Eebellion" nor the 
"Autobiography" interest actively. Yet there are on 
his pages grand specimens of noble diction. " NoUesse 
ohlige" seems to guide his pen. My " Eebellion" is an 
illustrated edition, and from its pages look those won- 
derful faces which the greatest of portrait painters 
has made immortal. Vandyke was needed to illumi- 
nate this stately record. There is Lord Herbert, with 
a charming, loveable face; and Denbigh, Eupert's 
lieutenant, with the turbaned negro page at his side ; 
and Falkland, looking exactly as Clarendon describes 
him: "his natural cheerfulness and vivacity clouded, 
and a kind of sadness and dejection of spirit stealing 
over him ;" and Newcastle, " a fine gentleman, active, 
and full of courage, amorous in poetry and music," 
with a face for a woman to fall in love with, and a 
beautiful Avhite hand with long tapering fingers — 
badge of a cavalier; and Prince Eupert, and "the 
Great Marquis ;" and a wonderful one of Laud. What 
a great thing it was for the cavaliers that Vandyke 
was at hand to paint them ! No one can open these 
volumes without feeling that he is among noble men. 
But to the book. 



28 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

What a "wild dark picture is that of the imfnrling 
of the royal standard at Nottingham: "According to 
the proclamation, npon the twenty-fifth day of August" 
(Clarendon does not disfigure such a passage with 
Arabic numerals), "the standard was erected about 
six of the clock in the evening of a very stormy and 
tempestuous day. The king himself, Avith a small 
train, rode to the top of the Castle hill ; Varney, the 
knight marshal, who was standard-bearer, carrying 
the standard, which was then erected in that place, 
with little other ceremony than the sound of drums 
and trumpets. Melancholy men observed many ill 
presages about that time. There was not one regi- 
ment of foot yet levied and brought thither, so that 
the trained bands Avhich the sheriff had drawn together 
was all the strength the king had for his person and 
"the guard of the standard. There appeared no conflux 
of men in obedience to the proclamation ; the arms 
and ammunition were not yet come from York ; and 
a general sadness covered the whole town, and the 
king himself appeared more melancholic than he used 
to be. The standard itself Avas blown down, the same 
night it had been set np, by a very strong and unruly 
wind, and could not be fixed again in a day or two till 
the tempest was allayed. This Avas the melancholy 
state of the king's affairs when the standard Avas set 
up." 

Why, in the dreary days of ours, now happily over, 
one is struck Avith the folloAving passage, the reader 
may guess when he thinks Avhat great laAvyers and 
judges in times of political excitement have held to be 
"law." Speaking of sliip money and the decision of 



CLARENDON. 29 

the Court of Exchequer in its favour, the high pre- 
rogative Clarendon says: 

" When ship money was transacted at the council 
board, they looked upon it as the work of the power 
they were obliged to trust. Imminent necessity and 
public safety were convincing persuasions; and it 
might not seem of apparent ill consequence that, upon 
an emergent occasion, the regal power should fill up 
an hiatus or supply an impotency in the laAV, But 
when they saw in a court of law (that law which gave 
them title and possession of all they had) apothegms 
of state urged as elements of law; judges as sharp- 
sighted as secretaries of state and in the mysteries of 
state; judgment of law grounded upon matter of fact, 
of which there was neither inquiry nor proof, and no 
reason given for the payment of the thirty shillings in 
question, but what concluded the estates of all the 
standers-by, they had no reason to hope that such 
doctrine, or the preachers of it, would be contained 
within any bounds ; and it was no wonder that they 
who had so little reason to be pleased with their own 
condition were not less solicitous for or apprehensive 
of the inconveniences that might attend any alter- 
ation." 

One thinks of warfare nearer home, and its victims 
on all sides, in reading Clarendon's account of the 
battle of Newbury, where Falkland fell — "a person of 
that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, 
of so flowing and obliging humauity and goodness to 
mankind, and of that primitive simplicity and integ- 
rity of life, that, if there were no other brand upon 
this odious and accursed civil war than that single 



30 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

loss, it must be most infiimons and execrable to all 
posterity." When, too, Carnarvon died — accidentally 
killed, like the brave Sonthern cbieftain (we may so 
speak of him now, methinks), who fell at Chancellors- 
ville: "After the troubles began," says Clarendon — 
and here the parallel Ave hint at runs closely — "hav- 
ing command of the first and second regiments of 
horse that were raised for the service, he wholly gave 
himself up to the office and duty of a soldier — no man 
more diligently obeying or more dexterously command- 
ing—for he was not only of a very keen courage in 
exposing his person, but an excellent discerner and 
pursuer of advantage of his enemy, and he had a mind 
and understanding very present in the article of danger, 
Avhich is a rare benefit in that profession. If he had lived 
he Avould have proved a great ornament, and by his 
death the king found a sensible weakness in his army." 
It is of the slaughter at Newbury that Clarendon says, 
with pardonable sympathy for his order, and sorrow, 
somewhat harshly expressed, for the noble blood then 
spilled : " On which side soever the marks and public 
ensigns of victory appeared most conspicuous, certain 
it is that, according to the unequal fate which attends 
the conflicts of such adversaries, the loss on the king's 
side was, in weight, much more considerable and pene- 
trating; for, whilst some obscure, unheard of colonel 
or ofiicer was missing on one side, and some citizen's 
wife bewailed the loss of her husband, there were, on 
the other, above tAventy officers of the field and per- 
sons of honour and public name slain upon the place, 
and many more of the same quality hurt." 

These are sad notes, for Clarendon is in every sense a 



CLARENDON. 31 

grave book. But once only do I recall any approach 
even to involuntary levity or cheerfulness, and that is 
in the solemn narrative of the mistake of Lord Port- 
land, which is spread over several pages and is too long 
to be copied, when the slip of paper was handed to him 
on which was written, "Remember Caesar" — meaning 
a promise to Sir Jnlius Caesar, a baronet of that odd 
name, but was mistaken for a threat of assassination. 
More than a hundred years afterward, Horace Walpole 
referred to it in a letter to General Conway: "We 
want the French," says he, "to put a little vivacity 
into us. The Duke of Newcastle has expected them 
every hour ; he was terribly alarmed t'other night ; on 
his table he found a mysterious card with only these 
words — ' Charles is very well and is expected in Eng- 
land every day.' It was plainly some secret friend that 
advertised him of the Pretender's approaching arrival. 
He called up all his servants, ransacked the whole 
house to know who had been in his dressing-room, and 
at last it came out to be an ansAver from the Duchess 
of Queensbury to the Duchess of Newcastle about 
Lord Charles Douglas coming home. Don't this put 
you in mind of my Lord Treasurer Portland in Claren- 
don — ' Eemember Caesar ?' " 



JUNIUS. 



My "Junius" is an edition in two octavo volumes 
(such a book is never printed now-a-days), by " Beasley, 
for Vernon and Hood, 1799." It is on fine, satin 
paper, illustrated by steel engravings of life-like por- 
traits, such as Sir Joshua and Gainsborough, Eng- 
land's only painters of the past, drew, and which, in 
spite of wigs, then near their end (for the Avig of Sir 
Joshua is as naught to Kneller's), put the men of the 
last century vividly before us. There is Charles Fox, 
coarse and hirsute, exactly the animal man he was, 
during his whole active life, and never tranquil till, 
having married his mistress, and in spite of the king 
become prime-minister, he went to St. Anne's Hill to 
read Horace, to have Crabbe read to him, and to die. 
There is another face, not in "Junius," for desultory 
notes invite digression, which art has preserved, closely 
associated with Fox. Get it, reader, if you can, and 
worship at the feet of beauty. It is by Sir Joshua, 
too, and will be found in one of the volumes of Selwyn 
— Sarah Lennox, the loveliest woman, except the Gun- 
nings, of a century ago ; in youth all that was gay and 
frivolous, in age, the sainted, blind mother of the 
Napiers. It was through her that the wonderful tri- 
umvirate of heroes — England's true Paladins — in- 
herited the blood of Charles the Second and Henry of 



, JUNIUS. 33 

Navarre. The hideous Fox and the lovely Lady 
Sarah are associated in the stale chronicles of obsolete 
English scandal, and hence, perhaps, I think of them 
together. Besides Mr. Fox, there is, in my " Junius," 
the portrait of that most genial of England's public 
men, whom we Americans are taught to disparage, 
Lord North, and Burke, with his essentially vulgar 
Celtic physiognomy, and the Duke of Bedford, and Sir 
William Draper (who once lived in Philadelphia), 
and Lord Granby, fat and florid, in a cuirass, and Mans- 
field and Blackstone, and George Grenville's stony face, 
looking the man of mere routine he was, of whom 
some one said that if he were to faint, the smell of an 
act of parliament would revive him ; and then, on the 
frontispiece, is a tall, graceful form, with the ribbon of 
the Order of the Bath or Garter, and a cloud hiding 
his face, and " Stat Nominis Umbra" written beneath. 
In 1799 no one seriously suspected who "Junius" was. 
In 1870 no one positively knows. 

The student of English letters cannot shut his ears 
to the question, " Who was 'Junius ?'" and many have 
thought there never was a more profitless question 
agitated. "There is better writing in the Times of 
to-day, when in an angry mood," the late Sir Eobert 
Peel said, "than there is anywhere in Junius." This 
is all very well ; but the letters we still read and 
admire and Avonder at ; and there is no demonstration 
of the author, although more than a century has rolled 
by since "Junius" as such appeared. He was a short- 
lived writer, beginning in 1769 and breathing his last 
in 1773. They were busy years for him. 

Young men are apt to read "Junius," for the worst 

a* 



34 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

of reasons, and, nine times out of ten, with the worst of 
fruits. His style is inimitable, and yet it is imitated. 
His morals, as a dark, anonymous defamer, were atro- 
cious, and yet the evil example has been largely and 
mischievously influential. The only safe rule of con- 
duct that any writer, old or young, can lay down, is, 
never to write a word for which he is not willing to be 
responsible, or a line, to which, if need be, he would 
hesitate to sign his name; yet this is the very rule 
which " Junius" defied. He was proud of being a 
stabber in the dark, and his was the penalty of carrying 
a perilous secret through a long and troubled life, and 
being unable to let it be known after his death for fear 
of dishonour to his memory. Anonymous writing is 
not what I condemn, for if condemned, it would be 
the death of the true freedom of the press, and an 
assimilation to what is seen in France, and recently, as 
it seems to me most grotesquely, in some periodicals 
nearer home. But one need not be irresponsible 
because anonymous. It is Cobbett, who, somewhere, 
strongly says, that " every man who writes a word or 
sentence on a sheet of paper ought to remember he is 
doing what may live forever ;" and, in my poor judg- 
ment, no honourable man should write a word for 
which he is not willing to answer. 

We live, in 1870, with a grand-daughter of George 
111. , still a titled sovereign on her secure throne, Avith 
a ministry like his, and a peerage and a parliament 
(albeit reformed), and a church, as Landor said of its 
Liturgy, "The sanctuary of our faith and our lan- 
guage ;" stronger, I, for one, earnestly trust, and purer, 
I know, than when Lord Chancellor Thurlow, in his 



JUNIUS. 35 

enthusiasm for Horsely, said : " I'll be d d if I 

don't make this fellow a bishop ! " " Junius" wrote 
his letter to the king, as near as may be, a century ago 
— the date being 19th December, 1769 — and to measure 
its merit, which is its boldness, one need hardly carry 
himself back to those prerogative times when, by-the- 
bye, no jury would convict of anything but "printing 
and publishing only." Mr. Burke, at that day no great 
lover of royalty, for it was before the sorrows of kings 
and queens had affected him, said " it made his blood 
run cold;" and reading it now, and looking to the 
conventionalisms of English society, I am by no means 
sure that such a letter written to Queen Victoria would 
not make Mr. Gladstone's flesh creep (of course, Mr. 
D'Israeli's would) and quicken the sluggish circula- 
tion of John Bright. Strange, but true, is it, to my 
personal knowledge, that Thackeray's social status in 
England was injuriously affected by his Lectures on 
the dead Georges, although he said nothing but what 
history recognizes. Divinity still hedges royalty. 

The letter to the King is a wonderful specimen of 
the author's power. I read it years ago, with a boy's 
admiration of its stilted and impressive rhetoric. I 
read it now with positive wonder at its impudence and 
the venomous, deadly satire which bristles in every 
line. It is not Pascal, Avho, though bitter in his irony 
at the Jesuits, is often gentle. It is not G;ibbon, with 
his easy-going sneer at all that is modest, and good, 
and devout. It is not Burke's sonorous denunciation 
of "a noble lord." It is more acrid than them all. 
The venom of his phrases is compacted with a sort of 
doubting panegyric; and the barb goes home and 



36 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

rankles. There must have been a wretched night at 
Kew Avhen George read and explained to Cliarlotte, or 
worse still (I really forget if he was married then), to 
his mother, the Princess Dowager, the withering sneers 
at the Scotch, Lord Bute, and himself, their victim. 
" Yon have still an honourable part to act. Tlie affec- 
tions of your subjects may still be recovered. Lay 
aside the wretched formalities of a king, and speak 
with the spirit of a man and in the language of a gentle- 
man." There is something terrific in his threat to the 
young king of the defection of his army. Eemember, 
reader, the times when these words were written, and 
cease to wonder that Woodfall was indicted for libel : 
"Your distant troops and marching regiments feel 
and resent, as they ought to do, the invariable, midis- 
tinguishing favour with which your guards are treated, 
while those gallant troops by whom every hazardous, 
every labourious serviceis performed, are left to perish 
in garrisons abroad, or pine in quarters at home, neg- 
lected and forgotten. If they had no sense of the 
great original duty they owe their country, their re- 
sentment would operate like patriotism, and have good 
cause to be defended by those to whom you have 
lavished the rewards and honours of their profession. 
The Praetorian guards, enervated and debauched as 
they were, had still strength enough to awe the Koman 
populace, but when the distant legions took the alarm 
they marched to Rome and gave away the empire." 
If a libel be criminal because it tends to a breach of 
the peace, surely this was libellous, and Lord Mans- 
field was not far wrong in thinking so. 

My notes do not lead me into the tangled field of 



JUNIUS. 37 

inquiry, where all sorts of weeds and briers grow, as to 
who "Junius" Avas. It may go into the category of 
the Eikon Basilike and the Iron Mask ; for one had 
better, as I do, accept the Franciscan theory on the 
authority of those who have studied tlie question on 
the spot, such as Lord Stanhope, and Sir James Mack- 
intosh, and Macaulay, and concede Sir Philip to be 
the man. But there is one belief, or conviction, or 
suspicion, which tinges this and every theory, that 
Lord Chatham, who retired to Hayes mysteriously, 
and thence emerged coincidently with the beginning 
and end of "Junius," had something to do with it. 
One man can keep a dangerous secret. But if there 
be in a secret common danger to two, two can keep it 
quite as well. 

If it wei'e Francis, and I concede him to be the 
active agent, what a moral does his career, as affected 
by this secret, enforce ! What a warning is here given ! 
He was but twenty-seven when, under other signa- 
tures than "Junius," he began to write anonymously. 
He was twenty-nine when "Junius" began, and but 
thirty-three when it ceased, and a ncAv career of suc- 
cess opened to him. All was comprised within the 
narrow limits of less than five years, and yet in a life 
of nearly fourscore, for he lived till 1818, with varied 
honours and successes, the secret doings of those five 
years were the heavy weight which bent his fierce 
spirit down. "The work of these years," says Mr. 
Merivale, " was a burden on him for more than fifty." 
It haunted him in public and private. It stood be- 
hind his chair at the dinner-table, and the skeleton, 
as it were, from the Speakers chair, faced him in the 



38 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

House of Commons. " May I ask you one question, 
Sir Philip ?" said a gentleman at a dinner- table. "At 
your peril !" was the fierce reply. " There is a strik- 
ing, almost terrible passage in Lady Francis's Eecollec- 
tions" — here again I quote Mr. Merivale — " in which 
she says that it was the opinion of some of his inti- 
mate friends that his hesitation in parliamentary 
speaking, which was a main cause of his comparative 
failure, was partly owing to the consciousness of his 
secret. He set so constant and habitual a guard on 
his lips, lest some compromising expression should 
find its way out of them, that the habit remained 
when the secret was not at all in question." Contrast 
this misery, for such it must have been, or else a cruel,- 
defiant imposture to be carried beyond the grave, with 
Sir Walter Scott's good-humoured mystification about 
his literary secret, and one can measure the distance 
between innocent and lovely romance, which contrib- 
utes to the pleasure of old and young, and dark polit- 
ical vituperation ; between the genial enthusiast of 
the border — one of those Scotchmen whom " Junius" 
loved to denounce and vilify, — and the irritable, vin- 
dictive politician who, under cover, was malignant 
enough to triumph over a father's sorrow for his child 
in the case of the Duke of Bedford, or a husband's 
shame in the infidelity of a wife in the Duke of Graf- 
ton's. Francis outlived every one of his victims ex- 
cept the King, who was blind and idiotic, and yet he 
dared not tell the secret. 

If Sir Philip Francis be "Junius," then has "Junius" 
a sort of American relation such as I like to evolve. 
In the graveyard of a sister city is a stone bearing the 



JUNIUS. 39 

name of Teuch Francis, a first cousin of Sir Philip, 
and for years Eecorder of Philadelphia. There, and 
in Ehode Island, where one was governor and senator, 
are his honoured descendants. The distinguished name 
of Tilghman, at the bar, on the bench, and in the 
military service of our ancient and classic times, is 
that of one branch of the Francis family. Tench 
Tilghman was Washington's dear friend and confiden- 
tial aid, and it may be that, from some hidden deposi- 
tory on this side of the Atlantic — for Sir Philip cor- 
responded freely with his American kinsfolk — may yet 
come some new light on this ancient puzzle.* 

* I note, because it is in an out-of-the-way place, that in one of the 
numbers of the Cornhill Magazine, while edited by Mr. Thackeray, is 
a curious contribution to the Junian controversy in connection with 
the burning of the Jesuit books in Paris. 



QUOTATION BOOKS. 



As in every house, we are told, there is a skeleton, 
and in every doctor's shop a case of instruments foi 
emergencies, mysteriously veiled from vulgar gaze, so 
in all libraries, and especially if it be one of a writer 
or public speaker, are there corners where are put away 
for convenient use, not only commonplace books, hap- 
pily out of date, but Indexes Eerum, and Burton's 
Anatomy, and Murray's Hand-books for Geographical 
illustration, and Lexicons and Concordances (all 
honour to those immortal C's, Cruden and Mrs. Cowden 
Clark), a Thesaurus or two, and, finally, "dictionaries 
of quotation." It depends very much upon their 
nature whether such dictionaries are good or bad. 
The young student uses them, and for this end they 
were first devised, to furnish him with quotations with 
which to garnish what he writes, and show his schol- 
arship. This is spurious. It is, the poet tells us, the 
page of knowledge which is 

" Rich with the spoils of time." 

It is out of the depths of a full mind that bright 
literary illustrations bubble up to the surface, and any 
critical eye can detect without fail a got-up quotation, 
or one which a mere dictionary supplies. Not so the 
" directory," as it were, which aids memory, and, given 



QUOTATION BOOKS. 41 

a fragment or sometimes even a word, enables the 
scholar to find the context. They are not merely val- 
uable, but, as auxiliaries, they are essential to complete 
literary work. Two of this kind I may venture to 
speak of — one, Bartlett's, American, and not a new 
book. The other English, Friswell's, and called prop- 
erly " Familiar Words." They are both defective, and 
mainly in this, that they attempt too much, and crowd 
their pages with " elegant extracts," which are not " fa- 
miliar quotations." None ought to be admitted except 
very trite ones, which, by-the-by, need not be there at 
all unless the writer or speaker who has used them can 
be indicated. As an illustration of Avhat ought and 
ought not to be comprised in such a book, I take two 
examples, haphazard, from each. Mr. Bartlett gives 
" Fletcher of Saltoun's letter to Montrose" as authority 
for, " If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, 
he need not care who makes the laws, of a nation." 
Strange to say, Friswell credits this to the Ediyiburgli 
Review. He might as well give it to the Atlantic 
Montldy or Lijipincott. I cite this as a proper selec- 
tion, though a defective reference. But when he gives 
a stanza of an unquotable poet like Montgomery, 
such as : 



" If God hath made this world so fair, 
Where sin and death abound, 
How beautiful beyond compare 
Will Paradise be found," 

he errs grievously, for surely no one but the feeblest 
clerical orator ever used such stuff. So Mr. Friswell. 



42 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

He gives from Wordsworth's "Personal Talk," of 
which few have heard, 

" Maidens withering on the stalk," 

and omits the original from "Midsummer Night's 
Dream," where Theseus tells Hermia that 

" Earthly happier is the rose distilled 

Than that, which, withering on the virgin thorn, 
Grows, lives, and dies in single-blessedness." 

Then, Mr. Friswell commits the enormity of italiciz- 
ing what he considers the "quotative phrase," and, 
nine times out of ten, misses it. This was once before 
done by the late Bishop Doane in an edition of the 
" Christian Year," in which he undertook to italicize 
what, according to his notion, were the beauties, and a 
wretched business he made of it — the episcopal and 
the common judgment very widely differing. Two 
quotations are omitted by both these compilers which, 
if not familiar, ought to be so : from a neglected scene 
in " Macbetli :" 

" Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell ;" 

and from " Agonistes :" 

" The vulgar only 'scaped who stood without." 

From these hand-books of the art the transition is 
natural — writing as I try to do, under suggestive im- 
pulse — to the art itself — what may be termed the phi- 
losophy of quotation. It is worth a thought, for no 
one claiming to be expert in original writing and crit- 
icism can be insensible to its value and its varied uses. 

There are some quotations, from good books too, that 
are so stereotyped as to become nauseous. There are 



QUOTATION BOOKS. 43 

some so interwoven in common talk that they have 
ceased to be quotations. Of the former, Colley 
Gibber's " aspiring youth that fired the Ephesian 
dome" (though, by the change of a single letter, it 
might have a clever application to a celebrated widow 
of the same spot in Asia Minor, from whom descend 

" Ceux de la Prudoterie 
Antique et celebre maison,") 

and " the bourn from which no traveller returns," 
and " suspicion always haunts the guilty mind," and 
"the winter of our discontent," and that one which 
the newspapers have seized, "discoursing eloquent 
music." These are as trumpery as the favourite line 
from the " Star-Spangled Banner," or Sir William 
Jones's " What constitutes a State," or Mr. Longfellow's 
" Silvery clarion," or those dreary " mills which grind 
slowly." They come from very empty vessels. Of 
the class of those which have interwoven themselves 
in common speech are Paine's " Times which try men's 
souls," or Dean Swift's "United as one man." It is 
one of the great tributes to Shakespeare that, though 
three hundred years old, he is fresh for use to-day, and 
we often talk Shakespeare without being aware of it. 

It by no means follows that a common, hackneyed 
quotation may not be effectively used. A new applica- 
tion of an old " saw" is often a success. One at this 
moment occurs to me of the capital use of an exceed- 
ingly common passage in Shakespeare, from a play 
frequently performed, and with Avhich every one is 
familiar. In Mr. Webster's speech in reply to General 
Hayne, in which, by the way, in view of the grave 



44 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

occasion, he seemed to scorn anght below Shakespeare 
or Milton, "Sonorous metal breathing martial sounds," 
in the passage in which (Mr. Calhoun in the chair) he 
taunted — for it was a taunt — the South, and the vice- 
president especially, with their disappointment on 
General Jackson's promotion, as it were, of Mr. Van 
Buren, he said, with grand emphasis, altering, which 
is permissible, one pronoun : 

" Upon thy head they placed a fruitless crown, 
And put a barren sceptre in thy gripe — 
Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand, 
No son of thine succeeding." 

So, Sheridan never did a cleverer thing than when 
he misquoted " Macbeth" on the Scotch members 
deserting Mr. Addington — 

" Doctor, the Thanes fly from thee !" 

While, let me say incidentally, Mr. Webster abound- 
ed in quotation out of his rich stores, for the words of 
the Bible and Milton and Shakespeare were literally 
heaped up within him (as all know who have enjoyed 
joyous social intercourse with him), his great rivals 
had none of it. Mr. Calhoun thought illustration 
from without unworthy of his severe logic, in this 
resembling Mr. Fox, who, though full of classic 
scholarship to overflowing, rarely used it exorbitantly 
— using this word in a strict sense — and Mr. Clay, 
who had no book learning, when he tried it made a 
dismal failure, as Avhere, in one of his reported speeches, 
he gave the doggerel of 

" How hard is tlie lot of the poor galley slave." 



QUOTATION BOOKS. 45 

John Randolph was rich in brief fragmentary cita- 
tions, and John Quincy Adams, with his Ormuzd and 
Ahrimanes, his Ebony and Topaz, was pedantic and 
formal, and never graceful. 

But it is on the pages of the reported speeches of the 
Bar and Parliament, still unparalleled, of our mother 
land, that we find the best illustrations of this art of 
quoting. There, speakers are able and not ashamed 
to quote the classics, and woe to him who stumbles 
into a false quantity. We read that, long ago, Pultney 
and Walpole, after fierce battles on politics, were re- 
conciled by a friendly discussion of a dactyl or a 
spondee. If Avith us, in the Senate for example, — by 
violent presumption our most scholastic body, — a 
Latin phrase beyond "sine qua non," or the more 
thrilling " E Pluribus Unum," were to be nsed, more 
than one would scratch his head in perplexity, and 
many an eye become more lustreless. It would be 
literally the vain scattering of pearls. In England, 
it is done without pedantry, and listened to without 
scorn. Witness Mr. Pitt's speech on the slave trade, 
in 1792, made, says tradition, after a long night 
session ; and, just as he reached his peroration, in 
which he contrasted the bright day of Europe with the 
struggling dawn in Africa, the morning sun broke 
through the windows of St. Stephen's, and he said : 

" Nos primus equis oriens afflavit anhelis, 
Illic, sera rubcns accendit luniine Vesper." 

Now and then, a bit of Latinity, cleverly used, puz- 
zles parliamentary scholars, as when, in his speech on 
municipal reform, in 1836, Lord Holland, a thorough 



46 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

scholar though poor speaker, said : " The works of 
man, my lords — the noblest, the boldest, the most 
sublime — crumble beneath the mouldering hands of 
time; the mountains and hills are washed away by 
the slow workings of the stream or shivered by the 
force of the elements; but the calm river flows on per- 
petually from year to year and from age to age. 

" Quaeque immota quies nimium premit ista peribunt, 
Sed qua perpetuo sunt agitata, manent.' " 

No one knew whence the apposite quotation came. 
It continued to worry and perplex its listeners for a 
year. Sir James Graham, in February, 1837, rather 
sneered at it as " a monastic pentameter," and at last 
Mr. Hobhouse discovered it, Lord Holland enjoying 
the joke hugely ; he found it in a medieval historian 
— Janus Vitanus — of whom your annotator freely con- 
fesses he never heard. 

Lord (then Mr.) Brougham had a peculiar knack of 
quotation — mingling admirably the classics of the liv- 
ing and the dead. In his speech for Queen Caroline, 
in his dissection of the Italian witnesses, one can im- 
agine the thunder in which he fired upon them, first 
a passage from Cicero and then one from Shakespeare. 
" I trust," said he, " there are in Italy, as everywhere, 
most respectable individuals. I have myself the hap- 
piness of knoAving many Italian gentlemen in whose 
hands I should think my life or my honour as safe as 
in the hands of your lordships. But while ' Sunt in 
illo numero multi boni, docti, prudentes qui ad hoc 
judicium deducti non sunt: multi impudentes, illite- 
rati, leves, quos, variis de causis, video concitatos. 



QUOTATION BOOKS. 47 

Verum tamen hoc dico de genere Grsecorum; qiiibus 
jusjurandum jocus est ; testimonium Indus ; cxisti- 
matio vestra tenebrae ; laus, merces, gratia, gratulatio 
proposita et omnis in impudenti mendacio.'" 

And then putting into the mouth of his client's 
Italian slanderers lachimo's dark words, he said: 

" Away to Britain 
Posted I in this design. 

Mine Italian brain, 
'Gan, in your duller Britain, operate 
Most vilely ; for my vantage excellent ; 
And to be brief, my practice so prevailed 
That I returned, with simular proof enough 
To make the noble Leonatus mad. 
By wounding his belief in her renown 
With tokens thus and thus ; averring notes 
Of chamber hangings, pictures, this her bracelet 
(O, cunning, how I got it !) nay, some marks 
Of secret on her person, that he could not 
But think her bond of chastity quite cracked." 

Here he paused, for the divinity which hedges kings 
and princes regent, stopped him on the edge of the 
jealous husband's denunciation of himself: 

"Ah! me, most credulous fool. 
Egregious murderer, thief, anything 
That's due to all the villains past, in being, 
To come !" 

Let me note one other quotation of Brougham's, 
neither Latin nor poetry, but from. the prose — always 
more difficult to handle — of his mother tongue. In 
defending Lord Durham's policy in the House of 
Commons in 1840, he read a passage from Kobertson, 
where one of Columbus's officers is spoken of as ex- 



48 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

needing his instructions. It thus concludes : " Gasca 
hastened" — (here loud cheers vife^Tupted him) — " to 
the scene of action, and, without either money or 
troops, utterly quelled the rebellion." 

Of classical quotations (of which I fear the reader 
has had enough), one of the most graceful is that 
related of Lord Carteret, on whom, when holding a 
court as lord-lieutenant. Swift bustled in and rudely 
asked him how he could do so and so. He good- 
naturedly replied, and with it quenched the Dean : 

" Kes dura, et regni novitas me talia cogunt moliri." 

Sir James Mackintosh said the best Latin quotation 
ever made was by Leibnitz, on hearing of Bayle's 
death, and imagining one of the rewards of his candid 
spirit in the other world. He quoted the Avords of 
Moenalcas in Virgil's Eclogue: 

" Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi, 
Sub pedibusque nubes et sidera." 

Mackintosh himself made a beautiful use of homely 
poetry when, writing a letter of consolation on Eobert 
Hall's religious insanity, he quoted Burns: 

" For yet the light that led astray, 
Was light from Heaven." 

To return for a moment to Parliament and the Bar, 
for notes take me hither and yon. Fox rarely qiToted ; 
Burke, often but elaborately ; Canning, gaudily; but 
no one in a more peculiar, homely, telling style then 
he of whom a woman has written, " His charm was a 
sort of gay, lovable, openness, which is the precise 
reverse of what Frenchmen call morgue*^ — Mr. Wind- 



QUOTATION BOOKS. 4.9 

ham.* In liis celebrated sjjeech in defence of bull- 
baiting — the very memory of which is enough to send 
Mr. Bergh to a premature grave — he said : " Of the 
diflFerence between the jolly bull-baiting peasant and 
his demure censors, I can only say : 

" Tom struts a soldier, open, bold, and brave, 
Will sneaks a scrivener, an exceeding knave." 

Or in his attack on the ministry for the Peace of 
Amiens, he said: "I find but two faults with these 
people, described in lines I once saw written on a win- 
dow-pane in a country inn : 

" Of faults poor women have but two : 
There's nothing good they say, 
There's nothing right they do." 

Now and then, a quotation is ruined and made gro- 
tesque by elaboration, as when Mr. "Wirt, an orator of 
very questionable taste, in arguing a quo warranto as 
to the right of a clei'gyman, the Kev. Mr. Duncan, 
in Baltimore, to a church from which he had been 
ejected, said : 

" This Duncan 
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been 
So clear in his great office, that his virtues 
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against 
The deep damnation of his taking off." 

Far better was Horace Walpole's or George Selwyn's 
rather equivocal one in a letter to Sir Horace Mann 



* The late Miss Emily Eden, daughter of Lord Auckland. 
3 



50 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

on the marriage of the young lady to the old physi- 
cian, Doctor Duncan, in which he made her say : 

" Wake Duncan with thy knocking. I would thou conldst." 

It is in the same letter Walpole says (and to me 
it seems the perfection of written wit), speaking of 
the revolution in Denmark, when Matilda was im- 
prisoned and Struensee murdered: "The queen has 
gone to Castle Croneuberg, and Struensee to David 
Rizzio." 

The late Sir Robert Peel, in one of his speeches on 
the Reform Bill, though I am unable from memory to 
say where, speaking of some real or imaginary disgrace 
to England, quoted with great effect Cowley's vigorous 
lines : 

" Come Koman, Saxon, or come Dane ! 
Come the eleventh plague, rather than this should be. 
We've mourned, we've sighed, we've wept, 
We never hlushed before !" 

Lord Chatham had a playfulness in his quotations 
not congenial, one would think, with his stately gait 
and solemn utterances, as in one of his American 
speeches, when speaking of those troublesome colonies, 
he said, from Prior : 

" Be to their virtues very kind, 
Be to their faults a little blind." 

But then, in a letter to his wife, whom he usually 
addresses as " My noble love," referring to the Tory 
bishops, he fiercely writes : 

" Yes, I am proud, I must be proud, to see 
Men not afraid of God afraid of me !" 



QUOTATION BOOKS. 51 

The old Divines of the Church of England had a 
very reverential way of "quoting." In the body of 
their sermons, they cited only the Holy Scriptures, 
rarely resorting even to patristic literature, but filled 
the margins with abundant and most graceful classi- 
cal citations, prose and poetry intermingled, though 
apart. One occurs to me as an exception to this, for 
it is in the text. Barrow, in his sermon on the king's 
" happy return," in a graceful, courtly strain, says : "As 
the good bishop, observing St. Austin's mother, with 
what constancy and passionateness she did pray for 
her son, being then engaged in ways of error and 
vanity, did encourage him saying, ' Fieri non potest, ui 
fiUus istarum lacrymarum pereat,' so we may hope- 
fully presume that a prince will not miscarry for whose 
welfare many good people do earnestly solicit." It is 
in this sermon we detect the source whence, uncon- 
sciously, was drawn Cato's "flourish in immortal 
youth," for the Divine of the Kestoration says : " The 
Graces, those goodly daughters of Heaven, smiling 
always with a never-fading serenity of countenance, 
flourish in immortal youth." It was of Charles II.'s 
ingratitude that the preacher wrote : 

" Te majus optavit redituram, Carole, nemo ; 
Et nemo sensit te rediisse minus." 

In our day Sydney Smith drew upon himself, with- 
out, for a wonder, meaning to do so, an universal laugh, 
when, in his sermon on the queen's accession, he at- 
tributed the " Nu7ic dimittis" to the Psalmist, and it 
was then that a Tory critic rebuked his unclerical 



52 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

levity by a quotation, "which I cite, not for its justice, 
but its aptitude : 

" Old man ! fall to thy prayers ; 
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester !" 

It is the same periodical critic — the Quarterly Re- 
vieiv — (and where will better writing be found than 
on its pages, from Scott and Gifibrd to Lockhart and 
Elwyn, one of the latest numbers containing a criti- 
cism on " Lothair" worthy of its best days ?) — which 
furnishes me my penultimate quotation, — in its way a 
gem; the italics are not mine. When, in 1839, the 
Melbourne ministry forced the young queen to change 
the ladies of the household and surround herself with 
Whig petticoats, the Quarterly said : 

" Time, we are told, teaches a shepherd to distin- 
guish his sheep by their individual physiognomy ; but 
her majesty has no such experience, and can know 
her new flock only by the Melbourne mark : 

" Omne cum Proteus pecus, egit altos 
Visere montes." 

I have spoken of the difficulty of successfully quot- 
ing prose either by pen or tongue, — greater, of course, 
with the latter, — yet once these ears heard it effectively 
done, no matter when, no matter where, for it is of the 
living I now write. On the trial of a woman, and a 
mother, too, for the murder of her husband, in front 
of the prisoner's desk were seated their little children 
— pretty, attractive, innocent-looking girls. No refer- 
ence was made to them, except by one of the counsel, 
who, at the end of his summing up, read (and this was 
a bold forensic experiment), and without a comment, 



QUOTATION BOOKS. 53 

this passage — almost too long to be cited here — which 
the scholar will recognize as from Mr. Hope's ghastly 
*' Anastasius :" 

"I had left a storm gathering in Egypt, of which I 
since have thanked God I witnessed not the bursting. 
Already, previous to my departure, the consequences 
of the scarcity had begun to appear in many places ; 
but it was only after I left the country that the famine 
attained its full force ; and such was, in spite of every 
expedient of human Avisdom, or appeal to divine mercy, 
the progressive fury of the scourge, that at last the 
Schaicks, and other regular ministers of worship, sup- 
posing the Deity to have become deaf to their en- 
treaties, or incensed at their presumption, no longer, 
themselves, ventured to implore offended Heaven, and 
henceforth only addressed the Almighty through the 
interceding voices of tender infants, in hopes that, 
though callous to the suffering of corrupt man, Provi- 
dence might still listen to the supj)lications of un- 
tainted childhood, and grant to the innocent prayers 
of babes what it denied to the agonizing cry of beings 
hardened in sin. Led by the Imans to the top of the 
highest minarets, little creatures from five to ten years 
of age there raised to heaven their pure hands and 
feeble voices, and, while all the countless myriads of 
Cairo collected round the foot of these lofty structures 
observed a profound and mournful silence, they alone 
were heard to lisp from their slender summits en- 
treaties for divine mercy. They only begged that a 
general pestilence might speedily deliver them from 
their lingering and painful agony ; and Avlien from 
the gilded spires throughout every district of the im- 



54 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

mense mass, thousands of infantile voices went forth 
the same instant to implore the same sad boon, the 
whole vast population below with half-extinguished 
voices jointly answered, ' So be it !' The humble re- 
quest God in his mercy granted." 

The speaker closed the book without a word of his 
own, and the effect was produced. 



BOOKS OF TRAVEL. 



The first books of travel I ever read were " Robin- 
son Crusoe" (not the didactic " Swiss Family Robin- 
son," but honest Daniel Defoe's) and " Lemi^el Gul- 
liver." And my " Gulliver" (it seems but yesterday, 
though there have been many yester-years) had a map 
of Liliput, and one of Brobdignag, too — a sort of 
Australia of islands — with the degrees of latitude and 
longitude " from Greenwich" duly marked ; and I 
incline to think I believed it, and looked for them in 
the atlas. I am sure I had some faith in Robinson's 
island, for it was in the days when the " Arabian 
Nights" (a beautiful little prayer-book edition) was 
smuggled into church to be stealthily read, as it seemed 

" A goodly place, a goodly time, 
To read as of the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid ;" 

and if there be a man with soul so dead who can 
read without emotion the discovery of Friday's foot- 
prints on the moist sand, I pity and pass on. It, 
and " George Osborn lying dead with a bullet in his 
heart at Waterloo" are the two great startling points 
of fiction, terribly like reality. 

Then, came narratives of African adventures j and 



56 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

here let me pause and note how thorough and complete 
is the efficacy (we can hardly measure it), politically, 
socially, or poetically, of the post-diluvian curse on 
this great continent. Africa has two slight fringes 
of civilization and interest, North and South, and this 
is all : Egypt and what was once Carthage at the 
North ; and Natal and a lovely paradise, the natural 
garden of the ferns and the lilies, the jasmines and 
the geraniums, the Gape Colony at the extreme South. 
All else, for sixty degrees of latitude, one-sixth of the 
old world's surface, from Mogador to Orange Eiver, is 
desolation and degradation, and what is convertible 
with degradation, the supremacy of the negro race. 

And Africa, — if personal memories may mingle 
with one's books, — I have seen. It was the giant gate- 
way through which my Eastern travel passed. 

On the morning of the 7th of September, 185-, after 
seventy days of sea monotony, with no sight of mother 
earth except the sand and pebbles picked up by the 
sounding-lead off the coast of Brazil, my uneasy slum- 
bers — for in approaching land neither passenger nor 
navigator has quiet rest — were broken by a message to 
come on deck, — for "there was something worth 
seeing." And there was! There, in the dim, orange- 
tinted dawn of a spring morning — for September is 
spring in those latitudes — with the moon sinking in 
the west, and the morning star over the mountains in 
the east, was Africa, the '•' Cape of Storms," or, in that 
gentler phrase — one of the most beautiful I know of 
which has survived so long — the Cape of Good Hope. 
There was Africa. And as I gazed on the scene of 
beauty, and as the Table Mountain and ranges of 



BOOKS OF TRAVEL. 57 

hills — for the dim ridges seemed to rise to vast dis- 
tances to the north — swelled np before me, I could 
not but think of the mysterious doom which haunts 
this continent, and of the translated miseries it has 
engendered, and of the freight of sorrow and suffering 
which has been sent across the ocean. And then, in 
the light of that poetic dawn, I thought of the heroic 
adventurer, who, more than three hundred years ago, 
came hither in a humble craft as the herald of occi- 
dental conquest, and of the sublime imagining of the 
poet of Portugal, of the Genius of Asia rising from the 
ocean, and, as if prescient of the future, warning him 
away. We drew near the land, and the anchor dropped 
and the salute was fired, and there Avas mysterious 
silence in return ; and the tragic message came to us 
that a bloody mutiny of black men against white men, 
of servants of an alien race against their masters, had 
burst forth, and that the great fabric of British empire 
in India was tumbling down in bloody ruin. There 
were not left at the Cape artillerymen enough to fire a 
salute. And we went ashore and rested in a wilder- 
ness of flowers ; for such is Southern Africa, the' land 
of the ferns, and the bulbs, and the geraniums, and the 
roses, with the orange-trees in full blossom, and the 
camellias just over. What idea had I, or have you, 
gentle, well-educated reader, of Southern Africa and 
this, its capital ? Hottentots and CaflFres and Fingoes 
and elephants and ourang-outangs were my ideals. I 
certainly never dreamed of a picturesque town with 
wide, well-shaded streets and public squares, and 
libraries, and botanic gardens singularly beautiful, and 
omnibuses and hansom-cabs, and brilliant equipages, 

3* 



68 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

and pretty, briglit-eyed, fair-cheeked women ; certainly 
not of an easy journey into the interior over good roads 
carried up steep mountain slopes by gentle gradients, 
and lovely villages, such as Paarl and Wellington, and 
vineyards like good Mr. Cloete's at Constantia, and 
hearty welcomes in one's mother-tongue everywhere. 
Kot that the traces of the early colonists, the Dutch, 
are wholly effaced. Far from it. The village names 
attest their existence yet, and he who drives into 
Stellenbosch — a perfect Paradise of white roses — at 
two o'clock in the afternoon, and finds, as I did, all 
the inhabitants asleep, will not doubt that Dutch 
repose is still unbroken. There, too, one sees the little 
jasmine-covered cottage, at Feldhuysen, whence for 
four years, from this end of habitable creation. Sir 
John Herschel " gauged the southern heavens." 

And it was of Africa my boy-books of travel told me. 
They were two ; one, the adventures of an American, 
who, on an unlawful voyage, probably to pick up a 
fcAV involuntary emigrants, was, or said he was, wrecked 
on the western coast of Africa. His name was Eiley. 
He was captured and wrote a book about his adven- 
tures — an octavo, illustrated, like some others in colder 
regions, with pictures of places never seen and possibly 
non-existent. It was bought greedily and read credu- 
lously; but alas! the discovery was soon made, and 
there was agony in the awakening, that not one word 
of it was true. It has now very much passed out of 
memory. 

Next in order came James Bruce, who travelled just 
a hundred years ago, and gave to the amazed world 
the narrative of his exploration of the sources of the 



BOOKS OF TRAVEL. 59 

Nile. The history of this book — it is in seven volumes, 
and Mr. Astor has it — is curious. Its fate was, at tirst, 
to be discredited, and then, after a long interval of 
eclipse, to be vindicated. Bruce was a Scotchman 
(Macpherson Fingal's contemporary), and there was a 
time in England, and America too (and Mr. Buckle 
seems disposed to revive it), when a Scotchman could 
do nothing right and say nothing true. Hence, he was 
denounced and discredited ; and it is only of late, since 
Lord Napier of Magdala with his soldiers broke in 
the side-door of Abyssinia, and Baker and Speke car- 
ried their unblushing wives through all the naked 
horrors of Nubia, and that mysterious itinerant entity, 
Dr. Livingstone, made his pleasant trips up or down 
(I really do not know which) the Zambesi, it has been 
made manifest that, according to his lights, Bruce 
told the truth. Commenting, as recently as 1840, on 
the Indian story told by Dr. Morse (Jedediah, not he 
of the telegraph) of the savage who, returning from 
Washington to his tribe, told them of what he had 
seen — " canoes holding seven hundred sailors," and 
" wigwams where a thousand people met to worship 
the Great Spirit ;" and was shot down as " too great a 
liar to live," an English writer says truly and wisely: 
" Before the civilised world passes its hasty sentence 
on this wild tribe for their obdurate incredulity and 
injustice and cruelty, we feel it but justice to the red 
man merely to whisper the name of James Bruce, of 
Kinnaird." Nor is his the only case of long deferred, 
or, as it were, intercepted justice to the truth of a 
traveller's story. Marco Polo, after eight or nine cen- 
turies (remember, reader, I am away from books and 



60 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

may sometimes be wrong a century or two) of discredit, 
is now recognized as authority, and Ferdinand Mendez 
Pinto, who, in a phrase familiar to every student of dra- 
matic literature, was denounced as '' the type of liars," 
is now admitted to have told the simple truth about 
the East. So was it with Bruce. The pleasure-seeking 
traveller, who sails over a calm and safe sea in four or 
five days from Malta or Brindisi to Alexandria, and 
up the Nile to the cataracts, in a covered boat with a 
French cook, knows naught of Bruce's trials when 
steam was not, and the Mediterranean had worse dan- 
gers than Gregales ; and when African corsairs, by the 
consent of Christendom, plundered from Jaffa to Gibral- 
tar. There were no hospitable Khedives then. Yet he 
travelled bravely on, this whole-hearted Caledonian ; 
and when his work was ended, and his triumph won, he 
tells simply the story of success. It was not the loud 
cry of the Greeks when they saw the sea from the 
mountains of Trebizond, or of the Germans in other 
days than ours, when they caught a glimpse of the 
Khine; but it was the gentle meditation, the venial 
exultation of a brave man, rejoicing at a great result: 

" I saw immediately below me the Nile, strangely 
diminished in size, and now only a brook, with scarcely 
water to turn a mill. I could not satiate myself with 
the sight, revolving in my mind all those classical 
prophecies that had given the Nile up to perpetual 
obscurity and concealment. 

' Arcanum natura caput non prodidit ulH, 
Nee licuit populis, parvum te, Nile, videre.' 

" I enjoyed the triumph which, by the protection of 
providence, I had gained." 



BOOKS OF TRAVEL. 61 

These honest words were written on the 24th]Soveni- 
ber, 1770, just a century ago, and the great river flows 
on, and truth is vindicated. 

After Bruce and Africa, was a long void of this sort 
of migratory reading, when, suddenly, there came a 
new call for it. In 1825, only forty-six years ago, it 
became necessary for him who writes these lines to 
learn something about the Isthmus of Panama, a 
transit as well understood now as the Fulton Ferry. 
It was then as obscure a region as, before we bought it, 
was Alaska. No one had been there. No one evei 
wished to go there. A voyage round the Horn or 
through Magellan's Straits (all honour to his memory !) 
was preferable to that dismal depth. Porto Bello, odd 
misnomer, and Onioa, and Chagres, and Cruces, have 
a miasmatic sound, and Admiral Hosier's ghost seems 
to haunt the accursed region. Has the reader for- 
gotten, and, if he has not, they are worth reproducing, 
Glover's fine lines : 

" All in dreary hammocks shrouded, 

Which for winding-sheets they wore, 
And with looks by sorrow clouded, 

drowning on that hostile shore : 
On them gleamed the moon's wan lustre, 

When the shade of Hosier brave 
His pale bands was seen to muster 

Rising from their watery grave ; 
On the glimmering wave he hied him 

Where the Burford reared her sail, 
With his ghastly crew beside him, 

And in groans did Venion hail." 

Literally the only guide-books which could be found 
were old Ulloa's quartos, and we, who expected to 



62 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

make the transit, studied how the Spaniard, centuries 
ago, paddled or poled up the little river among the 
alligators, and scrambled on mule-back across the 
Sierra to the peaceful sea. Now, Omoa and Chagres 
are no more, Aspinwall, a name redolent of the Fifth 
Avenue, is in their place, and a railway — soon, alas 
for stockholders ! in its turn to be superseded — spans 
the mountains. Nor was it much better with Mexico. 
As late as the year I speak of, the best itinerary was 
Humboldt, and yet his high science hardly made 
books of travel or of guidance ; so that, down to 1824, 
when Mr. Poinsett wrote a little tract about it, Mexico 
was virtually unknown. One pauses in wonder at 
Humboldt (oh, that his private letters had never been 
printed!) in his American wanderings, nor is there 
anything in technical poetry finer than his description 
of the midnight cry of the Indian guides on the levels 
of the Andes. " The cross lends /" And here let an 
actual traveller note that the constellations of the 
Southern hemisphere, including the boasted crucial 
one, with the feeble star at the end of the cross- 
piece, spoiling its symmetry, bear no comparison to 
the bright variety of the North. I am fully of the 
same mind with Miss Eden, who, in her pleasant 
letters from India, recently published, says: "How- 
ever, though we sail slowly, we are in our own Northern 
hemisphere again, which I mention that I may twit one 
of our friends who told me, when I was coming to 
India, that I should never see the ' Great Bear' again. 
Dear old beast, he came in sight again the night be- 
fore last, looking handsome and friendly, worth all the 



BOOKS OF TRAVEL. 63 

Southern crosses and scorpions. It is something to 
know one's own stars again." * 

Then, some thirty or forty years ago, beginning with 
a feeble rill, came rushing upon us the great tide of 
books of European travel by Americans, and Ameri- 
can travel by English men and women. The last 
angered us terribly for awhile, but latterly we have 
come to think they did not judge us unfairly, and 
that much they said was true ; nor does any rational 
American feel a moment's irritation except when, in 
cases like Mr. Dickens, now deified by booksellers' 
frankincense, who, after being welcomed with an 
enthusiasm which, however absurd, he could not com- 
plain of, turned, and slandered and ridiculed us to the 
full extent of the evil genius of caricature. 

Professor Silliman's, and the book of an amiable 
Quaker named Griscom, were the first and best of 
American gossipping travels abroad, and, though obso- 
lete and forgotten now, have a certain value as records 
of what the transatlantic world was, or to our eyes 
seemed, half a century ago. Then broke out the dis- 
ease of travel-books. Not a clergyman, spending a 
few months abroad at the expense of his flock, and 
threatened with mild bronchitis or incipient tubercles, 
but wrote his two duodecimos, and duly recorded 
sea-sickness, with devotion interjected, the custom- 
house vexations, as if there were none at home, the 
cosy breakfast at Liverpool, and Chester Cathedral. 
It is an actual branch of American literature, begin- 

* Published in " Temple Bar," for 1870. 



64 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

iiing, as I have said, with Silliman, and ending, it 
is to be hoped, with Bellows. In this chapter of dry 
immortelles, Mrs. Stowe stuck her unlucky "Sunny 
Memories." Among books of European travel by 
Americans, I recall but two, perhajss three, which are 
now readable, or have any value, and they are the 
works of accomplished and unspoiled men, not clerical, 
—Mr. Hillard's " Italy," Mr. Wallis's charming little 
book on Sjiain, and perhaps, though it is many days 
since I have read it, Alexander McKenzie's " Year," in 
which I recall his description of dancing with a blind 
girl at Madrid — the best defense of waltzing ever made. 
Travel-books of later years are of a different tone. 
They are no longer personal gossip, but something 
far higher. To see the improvement, look at those 
which are mere personal narratives — Lord Dufferin's 
" Yachting in the North ;" Lady Duff Gordon or Miss 
Frere's journeyings ; Miss Martineau's Eastern Life — 
admirable till she goes to Palestine and wraps herself 
in the cold atmosphere of skepticism ; and Curzon's 
Armenia, and Monasteries of the Levant. All these 
are fascinating, and to read them makes one wiser and 
better. Our own John L. Stephens, whose gentle, 
bright face and winning manner come back like a 
pleasant dream, wrote delightful books of intrepid 
travel, but, somehow, they seem, even in the city of his 
birth, where booksellers once petted him, to be forgot- 
ten. His hand raised the curtain of the Yucatan 
mysteries, and when death struck him down, no one has 
seemed Avilling to look for them again. The world, as 
known to the moderns, has few unexplored pathways, 
but there are some ; and then, too, there are those of 



BOOKS OF TRAVEL. 65 

which the interest seems inexhaustible, although the 
track is beaten. Of such, to my mind at least, is the 
cradle of the human race, mythically and historically, 
the valley of the Euphrates, and that other mountain 
region of the cis- Caspian where Ararat stands and 
the ark rested. A great outcry was raised, years ago, 
when Lord Elgin rescued the frieze of the Parthenon 
from the robbers and runagates of modern Greece, but 
no whisper was uttered when Mr. Layard brought the 
Nineveh bulls from the swamps of Mosul. Interest 
still clings t o old Mesopotomia. The best and most 
complete book of travels in the language describes 
that region, and is well worth study. It is Colonel 
(now General) Chesney's voyage down the Euphrates, 
published ten years or more after the journey was 
made. Next to that — hardly a book of travels — Sir 
Emerson Tennant's " Ceylon." 

Here, on the threshold of the great insular East, — 
the Straits of Malacca, and Sumatra and Java, the 
Eden of the Indies and Borneo, over which the brave 
spirit of the British Eajah floats in sorrow for inef- 
fectual enterprise, — I stay my steps and sjjare the 
reader. 



MEMORIES OF THE EAST. 



Feom books of travel, the transition is natural to 
the memory of one's own distant pilgrimages, and if, 
as has been often said, the man of action is socially 
more attractive than the man of books, an episode of 
travelling garrulity — a little bit of venial egotism — 
may be pardoned to a student. The dismal narrative 
accredited to Lord Macartney, tliough written by Sir 
George Staunton, but recently dead, of the fruitless 
embassy to Peking, more than seventy years ago, Avas a 
study, as Lord Amherst's with his romantic shipwreck 
is a memory, of boyhood. The latter has its mature 
associations too. In the summer of 1852, under the 
guidance of one of England's most scholarly men, it 
was the writer's fortune to visit Knowle Park, the 
antique seat, in Kent, of the Dukes of Dorset, and to 
see Queen Elizabeth's bed, and what is much better, 
among other treasures of art, Eeynolds' great portrait 
of Burke in the prime of his fame, and Mrs. Abingdon 
in all her loveliness. The historical dukedom is now 
extinct, and the ancient mansion vacant. Into this 
family, the Lord Amherst of China, the son or grand- 
son of owr historical Sir Jeffrey, had married, and was 
then (if I mistake not) living in a modest cottage near 
by. In five years from that time, the writer was in 



MEMORIES OF TUE EAST. 67 

the East himself, and in China, too. May he venture 
on some scattered memories and dim impressions ? 

There is a strange feeling in being confronted for 
the first time with that gigantic dreary entity, Pagan- 
ism, not Mohammedanism, which is a religion, but 
mere negative Paganism. For the Mussulman, or the 
Parsee, one has a sort of respect. He is at least 
sentimentally devout, which a Chinese, or Japanese, 
or Malay, never is. The contrast is obvious every- 
where. It shows itself in substance and in trifles. 
Standing, one frightfully hot day, on the piazza of 
the consular residence at Aden, that dreary spot at 
the mouth of the Eed Sea, where it only rains once 
in two years and on which a green leaf is never seen, 
and gazing on the wilderness of rock and sand and 
cinders, to find something pleasant to look upon, 
my eye was attracted by a Mohammedan sentinel 
pacing on a parapet. At a certain hour, probably 
noon, he laid his musket on the ground and, kneeling, 
prostrated himself, with his turban almost buried in 
the sand, toward Mecca, the prophet's tomb, for, by a 
sort of magnetism, they all knoAV its direction, and 
made his silent adoration. This was striking. It 
was picturesque. It was, in a certain sense, devout, 
and until then, in all my Avanderings in Pagandom, it 
had never been my lot to see anything like " devotion." 
The Chinese certainly have none of it, and the 
Japanese very little. There are in Japan some reli- 
gious ceremonies in Buddhist temples which were im- 
pressive — mainly so from their strange resemblance to 
the ceremonial of the Church of Eome. At first sight, 
it might be supposed to be the actual sacrifice of the 



68 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

mass. But tlie great intellectual community of China 
— for sucli it is in all the elements of shrewdness and 
cunning and industry and energy and education, its 
common schools and competitive examinations very 
much resembling some other intelligent and irreligious 
communities we know of — rejects devotion absolutely 
and entirely. The most degraded order of humanity 
is the priesthood, the most disregarded objects are the 
idols. This was one of the thousand puzzles of this 
odd land. Everything is perplexity. Ask a China- 
man who reverences his ancestors, if he believes they 
exist in any state of being, that he will after death go 
to them or they revisit him, and he will look with 
blank amazement at you and utter some platitude 
about "universal benevolence." There is sometimes 
hinted at a sort of diffused immortality, by which the 
soul of the departed " branches" in three directions, 
one remaining with the body, one with the votive 
tablet put up in its honour, and the third, the sub- 
division least cared for, votatilizing itself into the 
world of spirits. So with their care of the dead ; the 
huge coffin is part of the furniture of every house. It 
is so constructed that without inconvenience it can be 
retained for years, or until the propitious moment and 
the propitious spot for interment be found, and then 
it is buried with honour, not in the ground, but on 
its surface, over which an arch is thrown and soil 
placed, and where the flowers and the weeds grow in 
frightful luxuriance. It is one vast burying-ground, 
and yet not sacred in any sense, and no idea of an 
immortal spirit seems to enter into their cold rhetori- 
cal sentimentalism about the dead. So asrain with 



MEMORIES OF THE EAST. 69 

their idols and their temples. They are elaborate and 
grotesque, and, in a strange sense, ornamental ; but no 
one venerates and no one cares for them. Thus it is 
every Avh ere. On one island of the Chusan Archipel- 
ago, five miles long by one broad, there are one hun- 
dred temples all in decay and ruin, and that, too, from 
no appreciable decline of the faith they represent, but 
from the strange and inexplicable inconsistency I have 
alluded to. The Avayfarer is put to lodge and eat in 
holy temples, and in the north of China I have one 
day seen Englishmen playing skittles, and, on Sunday, 
attended divine worship according to the forms of the 
Church of England in the very shadow of hideous 
Buddhist idols, the Chinamen around caring as little 
for the desecration as the idols themselves. Every 
Chinese idol, however, has a hole in the back of the 
neck to permit the god to go in and out at his pleas- 
ure, and it may be the idol was " in vacation" when 
these improprieties were committed. "While in Mo- 
hammedan, or Persian, or Christian lands, the dese- 
cration of a sacred building by infidel insult would 
be resented as frightful sacrilege, one might, in a 
Chinese joss-house, commit any irreverence or in- 
decency, not only with impunity, but with absolute 
and most contemptuous indifference on the part of the 
believer. And- yet, around it, such as it is, hangs a 
kind of venerable association, and through its dark, 
stony surface, refracted and distorted threads of gentle 
radiance — some good and humanizing influences — 
may be detected. Five centuries and a half before the 
Christian era, about the time when the handwriting 
on the wall told Belshazzar his empire's fall, when 



TO AMONG MT BOOKS. 

the Tarquins reigned in Rome, and Solon gave laws 
to Athens, a Chinese philosopher wrote Avords which 
have survived to this day, and now give faith and 
doctrine to four hundred millions of intelligent human 
beings. "Four hundred millions," says a modern 
writer, "think of it! What does it mean? Count it 
night and day ; without rest or food or sleep, you con- 
tinue the weary work; yet eleven days have passed 
before the first million is completed, and more than 
as many years before the end of the tedious task is 
reached." For the mental and moral guidance of these 
and the myriads who have lived and read in the last 
tAveuty-four hundred years, Confucius wrote. I have 
seen his birthplace and reputed tomb, — the legend- 
ary spot of China, one of the few striking pro- 
montories its flat coasts exhibit, — and it tasks one's 
widest conception to measure such an influence as this 
humble philosopher has exercised. His system is 
less one of religion than of ethics and economy, 
though it has taken the place of religion. His politi- 
cal maxims commend themselves to common sense, 
reason, and justice, and have exerted, as all testify, a 
happy influence on the government and people of 
China. The leading principle of government is that, 
no doubt, which has so long maintained the integrity 
of the empire, a central authority, exercising as little 
local and individual influence as possible, and a strict 
respect for what, in our dialect, was once called " State 
riglits" — local municipal independence. I say some 
gentle, humanizing rays enliven this twilight of moral- 
ity. Confucius's system, for instance, taught obedience 
to parents and love to brethren; respect for the aged, 



MEMORIES OF THE EAST. 71 

for magistrates, and for all superiors ; courtesy and 
friendship among equals, and kindness toward in- 
feriors. The virtue of filial reverence is predominant 
in the East, and looking at it and the wonderful lon- 
gevity of this empire, we may well believe that " honour- 
ing father and mother" has made their days long in 
the land which the Almighty has given them. No- 
where will you see more tenderness to children than 
in China, and yet — here is another puzzle — nowhere, 
it is said, is infanticide more common. I have seen a 
Chinese father nursing his sick or wounded child with 
a tenderness that would put a heartless mother in 
Christian lands to the blush. There are in all the 
cities of China, foundling hospitals, like those of 
Paris and London, with Avickets where the babe is 
deposited and the bamboo (for the bamboo does every- 
thing in China), to give notice before the poor mother 
flies into darkness, perhaps to return, as in Chris- 
tian countries (for the great maternal heart beats 
everywhere), to be hired as a nurse for her abandoned 
child. The charity which this phase of Paganism 
teaches, founds hospitals and dispensaries where, as 
here, young physicians are emulous of place for the 
sake of practice, though the mode of dispensing reme- 
dies is rather different, for, in China, the patient has a 
variety of prescriptions presented to him, and then 
draws lots for the one he takes. 

And when I speak of the distortion, the refraction 
as it were, of pure religious truth by this oriental the- 
ology or philosophy, there is one familiar to every stu- 
dent and traveller which is curious: "Do unto others 
as you would have others do unto you," Christian. 



72 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

inspiration taught eighteen hundred years ago, and 
five hundred years before, Confucius had laid down his 
rule of morals : " Do not to others what you would not 
have others do to you;" a let-alone principle eminently 
Chinese. 

In China — unlike India, where castes and classes 
rule — the visible head of religion, as of secular author- 
ity, is the Emperor, and around him, as chief-priest, 
hangs much that is graceful as well as not a little 
which is grotesque. What they call "deity" is ap- 
proached by the chief magistrate, who soon, to their 
vision, becomes clothed with the attributes of the 
divinity with whom he communes. As high-priest he 
performs, among many others, the beautiful ceremony 
of welcoming the spring and ploughing the land in 
the presence of his court and subjects. As intercessor, 
he offers up prayers for the relief of the sorrows and 
sins and sufferings of his peox)le, one of which, as 
recently as March, 1853, in time of bloody civil war, 
has a ring of gentleness and pious sympathy which 
sounds pleasantly in the ear. 

"In tbe first decade of the present moon," says the 
Pekin Gazette, — the government organ, as it were, — 
" when the prayers for grain and the great sacrifices 
are offered, we intend to proceed in person to the front 
of the altar, and, after a night of watching and fast- 
ing, reverently offer up our heartfelt supplications that 
our people may once more enjoy repose and perpetu- 
ally cease from civil war and strife. Eeflecting upon 
the distresses of my people, some of whom have had 
no means of obtaining a livelihood, we have again 
and again blamed ourselves. I am filled with appre- 



MEMORIES OF THE EAST. 73 

heiision and Immbly entreat augnst heaven to pardon 
my offences and spare my poor people !" This, I 
repeat, has a sweet and gentle sound, and who shall 
say if, instead of the clamonr of brutal and exultant 
fanaticism, such a voice of humble contrition could 
have been heard from Christian lips not very long ago 
in this our land, it would not have been listened to ? 

The Pekin Gazette is " the government organ." It 
is so strictly. It has all the characteristics. It praises 
all the government does. It publishes all the impe- 
rial edicts and official bulletins. Any one who hap- 
pened to be in China in time of war had a chance of 
knowing something of dispatches from its "War De- 
partment," such as the Chinese had the privilege of 
reading, as it were, through their "Associated Press." 
I was the involuntary witness of a battle in the north 
of China, when the English and French assaulted 
and, with some slaughter on the part of the Chinese, 
carried the Peiho forts. It was a bloody and disastrous 
rout. The "War Department" at the capital rose to 
the occasion and instantly issued a bulletin announc- 
ing a great and " decided" victory, attributing the 
surrender of the forts, not to the enemy's arms, but to 
"an unusually high tide, which washed out the garri- 
son." Not only have they a government newspaper, 
but there is annually published what we call a hlue- 
hooh, in Avhich are printed the names of all the officials 
with their salaries, and they have a mode of compensa- 
tion which might possibly be introduced witli advan- 
tage in other lauds. They give their office-holders 
certain specified salaries, and then a further sum, 
described in their blue-book as "a virtue-preserving 

4 



T4 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

addition," to secure them from temptations, which 
(only in Eastern lands, of course) are supposed some- 
times to influence public servants. 

But to return to the imperial authority. As the 
vicegerent of Divinity, even according to the Chinese 
notion of it, the Emperor, except on rare occasions, 
is a mysterious and secluded being. No profane eye 
is allowed to see him. No outside barbarian has had 
a glimpse of the imperial recluse for seventy years, 
when Lord Macartney was taken to Pekin. Lord 
Elgin and the allied forces, in 1861, got near enough 
to plunder and burn his summer palace, but he was 
far away on the confines of Tartary, and though the 
strong hand of occidental power has solved the great 
difficulty of the sanctity of the capital, the western 
ambassadors are as far, practically, from seeing the 
Emperor as if they were idling, as of yore, at Canton 
or Macao. It is really divinity which hedges this 
king. Mr. Burlingame, who is supposed to have seen 
everything, saw not this. 

One other word on the religious aspect of the ex- 
treme East. 

From the soil of mere intelligence, unchastened 
and unsubdued, in China as elsewhere, have sprung 
the inevitable fruits. We know it in our country, 
that in those regions Avhere the subordination of the 
intellect to mere authority, and especially authority 
in matters of religious faith or sentiment, is resisted, 
there what may be described as Avhims or vagaries of 
intellect, absurd credulities of all sorts, are sure to 
grow in rank luxuriance. Everybody knows in what 
part of our land, table-turning, and spirit-rapping, and 



MEMORIES OF THE EAST. T5 

spiritual mediums, and all this brood of monstrosities 
have their growth, and it is unquestioned truth that, 
long ago — not centuries, for such absurdity has not the 
sanctity of age, but years — the turning of tables by 
the imposition of hands ; the creation, by contact, of 
spiritual communication ; talking to the absent, if not 
the dead, and having correspondence with them, was 
in fashion, and is yet, among the shreAvd, long-headed, 
money-making, infidel Pagans farther east. Anoma- 
lous and ricketty as this great Celestial empire seems, 
there it stands, and there it is likely to stand, while 
the active powers of western civilization are powerless 
to affect it or to sustain themselves. Look for a mo- 
ment at the experiments of the past. In 1497 Vasco 
de Gama landed in India and planted an empire there. 
The poet of Portugal celebrated the deed in immortal 
verse, and a great colonial power was founded in the 
East ; and yet the whole of this enterprise is frustrated, 
and all that Portugal now holds in Asia are the little 
sorrow-stricken peninsula of Macao and that other 
once gorgeous city on the coast of Malabar, Goa. Goa, 
once called the golden, — where the aged De Gama 
closed his glorious life, where Camoens sung and suf- 
fered, — is now one vast and grassy tomb Avhere a thin 
and gloomy population seem spared only to chant re- 
quiems for its departed souls. " But," says a modern 
writer, " though Portuguese dominion may never re- 
vive in the East, so well were its foundations laid that 
its language has survived, and if, in the eventual tri- 
umph of Christianity, a Catholic church should be 
formed in India, Portuguese will be the language of 
the cliurch wherever it extends." And so should it 



Y6 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

be, when you remember that the great mission to the 
Indies in the fifteenth century of Xavier and Loyola, 
whose footsteps I seemed to tread everywhere, was 
begun under the patronage of Portugal. But her 
colonial empire is gone, and heathen China stands. 

Spain and France fared little better. All that the 
former has is her colony of the Philippines; while 
France, which, little more than a century ago, threat- 
ened to absorb all Hindostan, has now but two patches 
of territory — Pondicherry in the Carnatic, one hun- 
dred and six miles square, and the little island of 
Bourbon in the Indian Ocean. 

And yet heathen China stands, and stands to puz- 
zle us. Thus is the puzzle fairly stated by an exceed- 
ingly clever English writer of our own time : 

" In a country where the roses have no fragrance, 
and the Avomen no petticoats ; where the laborer has 
no sabbath, and the magistrate no sense of honour; 
where the roads bear no vehicles, and the ships no 
keels; where old men fly kites; where the needle 
points to the south, and the sign of being puzzled is 
to scratch the antipodes of the head ; where the place 
of honour is on the left hand, and the seat of intellect 
is in the stomach ; where to take off your hat is an 
insolent gesture, and to wear white garments is to put 
yourself in mourning; where there is a literature 
without an alphabet, and a language without a gram- 
mar, one need be surprised at nothing."* 

Pardon this wandering, and let us go back to books. 

* Winerrove Cook. 



THE PRAYER BOOK. 



Staet not, reader ! this is not theology or anything 
kindred to it. It would be the height of folly to write 
theology now-a-days, when the Modern TJiinJcer, dressed 
in all the colours of the rainbow, is flourishing his 
wooden sword about, and is sure to knock over any 
credulous clown Avho believes, as I do, in Avhat was 
taught me at my mother's knee. There are, in this 
autumn season, ugly nests filled with honeyless, sting- 
ing insects, which it is dangerous to disturb. Indeed, 
the mother's knee must soon be out of fashion, in an 
age of enlightenment, Avhen reputable men and women 
tell us, in print, that prostitution is better than maiden- 
hood, and "a woman may take as many husbands in 
Succession as her fancy dictates." There were pure 
mothers once ; and they taught their young children 
sweet, homely lessons out of this little volume, called 
"The Common Prayer Book." It is, however, only 
critically that a layman should write about it. Landor 
said " it was the sanctuary of our faith and our lan- 
guage," and it is to the latter and its story, these notes 
relate. 

Here, then, is a little volume of scarcely two hundred 
pages, of perfect English, which, created as English in 
sound, though black-letter in form, more than three 
hundred years ago, before Shakespeare's first play was 



78 AMONG MY BOOKS. 



4 



printed and performed, is as fresh as if written yester- 
day. It is not even old-fashioned ; and when, as here 
in America, an attempt was made to modernize it, it 
has been damaged. Open it at random — take any 
prayer or exhortation, the familiar " Dearly Beloved," 
or the "Declaration of Absolution," feebly whittled 
away in our American imprint, and read it aloud, and 
observe how fresh it is. Change a word and it is hurt. 
There are clergymen (I knew a bishop once) who im- 
agine they know the service by rote, and try to recite 
it memoriter, and a sorry time their hearers have of it. 
The jar caused by the substitution of a new word for 
any one that is familiar, is misery. One might as well 
alter Shakespeare. 

It is this very familiarity which is its charm. The 
Koman Catholic boasts, as well he may, that go where 
he will, his mode of worship is uniform, and the im- 
mortal language in which it is embalmed never varies. 
The Anglo-Catholic cannot say as much ; but, as Mr. 
Webster said grandiosely of the drum-beat, the Prayer 
Book of England encircles the globe and binds its 
Christian humanity together. There is no English or 
American man-of-war or merchantman on whose deck, 
if prayer there be, it is not used, and its simple, plain, 
inoffensive words, breathing no intolerance, have con- 
quered the scruples and prejudices of the most captious 
dissent. 

Looking at it aesthetically, the advantage, I will not 
say of any form, but of this form of prayer, will hardly be 
disputed. Those who are accustomed to what is called 
extemporaneous prayer, which, nine times out of ten, is 
committed to memory, and is always — with rare excep- 



THE PRATER BOOK. TO 

tions it has never been my good fortune to meet — more 
or less rambling and incoherent, a sort of hortatory 
address to the Almighty, will not question the artistic 
superiority of such a liturgy. This is shown by its 
universal adoption on emergencies. Take, for example, 
two notable proofs of this — the Burial Service, the 
grandest collocation of words in the language, actually 
dramatic in its force and pathos, and the " Form for 
Family Prayer." Dissenters almost uniformly use the 
one, and had much better adopt the other. The awk- 
ward oral panegyric on the dead — the story of ancestry, 
parentage, birth, and education — which is properly 
excluded from liturgies, and is always listened to with 
impatience, I am aware, survives; but when the mourn- 
ers come to the churchyard and reach the grave, the 
familiar "I am the Kesurrection and the Life," or 
those grander words, " Man that is born of woman 
hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery," 
rise up solemnly, as if the grave were speaking, or 
come down gloriously, as uttered from on high. So 
with family prayers. Weary is the suffering of him 
who has to make or listen to a new extemporaneous 
prayer for a family's welfare every morning and night. 
What dismal iteration ! What spasmodic efforts at 
variety! The English Prayer Book contains no form 
of family prayer — the idea of daily public service being 
there held — but who that has ever heard it, according 
to the American form, among those he loved at home, 
and then again, like home-bred melody, among strang- 
ers at the very antipodes, will doubt that there is 
magic in a familiar form of words ? 

But, says the dissenter from liturgical service, there 



80 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

is no earnestness and feeling, no sympathy between 
suppliant and listener, in this or any set form. The 
trutli is just the reverse, from the mere fact that all 
know what is to be said, and are not waiting for some 
tour de jjhirise from a clever " minister." Go into a 
country or a village church, — for there is too much 
diffusion in huge city edifices, suited only to cathedral 
service, — where every one is known to every one, and 
all are neighbours, and listen when the clergyman, 
without previous notice, utters the solemn words : " 
Father of mercies and God of all comfort, our only help 
in time of need, look down, pity, and relieve thy sick 
servant for whom our prayers are desired ;" and every 
thought turns at once to the vacant seat, and the 
individual sufferer is known, and the silence, as it 
were, speaks in earnest hope that the priestly prayer 
may be listened to; and when, at last, the dread alter- 
native is spoken, " or else give her" (I choose to fancy it 
a dying wife and mother) " grace so to take thy visita- 
tion that, after this painful life ended, she may dwell 
with thee in life everlasting," and every heart throbs 
in sympathy for a desolated home, and the work of 
prayer is done. Words, though formal, often unlock 
the heart. It was once the writer's lot, at the end of 
the cruel war which desolated so many homes and 
frustrated so many hopes and crushed so many hearts 
in this our land, to attend church, according to the 
Episcopal form, in Richmond, then in ruin. The 
Federal authority was restored, the " rebellion" at an 
end, the graves at Hollywood covered with fresh flow- 
ers, the tears for Stuart and the gallant Pegrams 
(Richmond's children) not dry, the Confederate Presi- 



TEE PRAYER BOOK 81 

dent a prisoner charged with vicarious crime. The 
Chief Magistrate of the United States was prayed for, 
decorously, according to the Eitual ; but when, in the 
Litany, the supplication was uttered, "That it may 
please thee to preserve all sick persons and young 
children, and to show thy mercy upon all prisoners 
and captives^ common as the Avords seem, there was 
a thrill in every heart — a thought of the' manacled 
captive at Fortress Monroe, their old friend and neigh- 
bour, whose courage in the darkest hour had never 
failed — which showed how a familiar " form" of prayer 
can stir the heart. 

It is an old story, the sailor's burial at sea, but one 
that never is without its pathos; and as "Dust to dust, 
ashes to ashes," has its echo, never heard without a 
shudder, from the earth the sexton's spade scatters oh 
the coffin, so, from the solemn cry of the master-at- 
arms, "All hands to bury the dead!" to the words, 
" We commend his body to the deep," and the shotted 
hammock slips with a dull splash into 

" The vast and wandering grave," 

no one hears it unmoved, or fails to think the elo- 
quence of the liturgy unequalled. 

We know of the Prayer Book and the Burial Service 
in fiction and in history, and that history our own. 
In fiction, the good old Baron of Bradwardine, after 
humanly " sending out liis patrols and pickets, reads 
the Evening Prayer of the Established Church" on the 
eve of Preston Pans; and Camilla, in Miss Burney's 
pretty but obsolete novel, dying, as she thought, in a 

strange inn, revives on hearing her lover's voice read- 
4* 



82 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

ing the offices for the sick. Mr. Trollope, irrevereut 
limner of tlie clergy, has no jest for the Prayer Book, 
thongh he speaks of Archdeacon Grantley's dressing- 
closet, " where he keeps his boots and his sermons !" 
In history : AVashington read prayers night and morn- 
ing at Fort Necessity ; as did Doctor Duche before the 
Continental Congress, though not, I trust, in the sprawl- 
ing fashion in which American art has painted him. 
The "Burial Service," for its prayers are "few and 
short,"' was read over poor Moore's uncoffined remains 
on that dark January night, sixty years ago, at Coruna. 
It was uttered over the proto-martyr of the middle 
colonies in the revolution — the Jacobite, Hugh Mercer 
— in the classic ground of old Christ Church ; and on 
the lawn at Mount Vernon, when, on the 16th of 
December, 1799, a little schooner anchored in the 
Potomac firing its simple salute the while, Washington 
sank to rest. But never was it more picturesque than 
at an enemy's grave during that same revolution. 

When, in the autumn of 1777, Burgoyne's army 
entangled itself in the fastnesses of the upper Hudson, 
and disaster lowered heavily around him and his gal- 
lant army, — for such, bating his Hessians and kindred 
Indians, it was — General Eraser fell mortally wounded 
by an American rifle-shot. He lingered, as we all 
know, in Madame de Riedesel's hut, where she and her 
children had taken refuge, and died, and was buried 
on a hill near by. The collection of officers at the 
funeral attracted the attention of the hostile artiller- 
ists, and a sharp fire was concentrated on the spot. 
Then was it that the exhortation of the Liturgy, " Be 
ye steadfast, unmovable," had a new significance, and 



THE PRATER BOOK. 83 

General Bnrgoyne (the name sounds sadly and pleas- 
antly in our ears just now over the sea-grave of the 
'Captain 'and the rescue of the Empress), a brilliant 
and accomplished Avriter, thus describes the scene in 
a "Narrative of the Northern Campaign" — which, 
reader, if you have never read, get at once ; 

" The incessant cannonade during the solemnity ; 
the steady attitude and unaltered voice with which 
the chaplain officiated, though frequently covered with 
dust which the shot threw on all sides of him ; the 
mute but expressive mixture of sensibility and indigna- 
tion on every countenance ; these objects will remain 
to the last of life on the mind of every one present. 
The growing darkness added to the solemnity. To 
the canvas and the pen of history, gallant friend, do I 
consign thy memory ! It Avill live long after the frail 
record of my pen shall be forgotten." 

One other historical illustration of my text occurs 
to me — the familiar anecdote of Lord, then Mr, Den- 
man, when acting as counsel for Queen Caroline. Her 
name being excluded from the Kitual in the regular 
supplication for the royal family, as if she were past 
praying for, Mr. Denman, with bitter pathos, said they 
dared not suppress the Litany for " the desolate and 
oppressed." 

The critical and historical literature on the Prayer 
Book — I say it with due reverence — is a scandal on the 
Anglican Church. Nor has the deficiency been sup- 
plied by the American branch. The dreary curse of 
" preaching," and preaching platitudes, rests upon the 
clergy. Spoiled by this very necessity, as well as by 
effeminate association, and theorateful incense so nro- 



84 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

fusely burned, especially in this country, under the 
clerical nose, they are not, as a general rule, accurate 
students, thorough scholars, even in their own profes- 
sional learning, and never critics. There is no Ameri- 
can book of scholarship on the Liturgy, and until Mr. 
Blunt's admirable annotated edition of 1866, too expen- 
sive to be within perusal and easy reach, there was 
none that I am aware of in England. Its rich and 
luminous pages tell all one needs to know. 

It is a curious record, this of the Prayer Book, and 
though extending with precise knowledge over eight 
hundred years, — for the " Salisbury Use" is dated A. d. 
1085, twenty years after the conquest, — not at all an ob- 
scure or intricate one. It illustrates, better than any- 
thing, the struggle for independence which Christian 
Britain always maintained. St. Augustin's great diflB- 
culty was to bring the free church he found in England 
under the absolute control of Eome, and, as to its forms, 
he failed. The Angli were very militant and rebellious 
Angeli. Latin, the language of the Continental church, 
was not the vernacular of England. It was never, but 
exceptionally, spoken there, as in ancient days it was 
in Portugal and Spain and Italy. The Saxon and 
Norman element was in chronic revolt. Tyndale's 
Bible was the first expression of this; and then, in slow 
time, woven out of the beautiful Latin and Greek 
liturgies, came the Prayer Book. The traces of the 
mixture of the ancient languages — those immortal 
twins of Greece and Italy — are singularly graceful. 
The two most beautiful prayers, the " Our Father" 
and that of the golden-mouthed Saint of Antioch, are 
Greek, while the Psalter and most of the prayers are 



THE PRATER BOOK. 85 

Galilean Latin, and the Collect for Grace is as old as 
the sixth century. 

And it was, as all know, a native-born Englishman, 
and a thorough churchman, — not a semi-Puritan, like 
Ridley or Latimer (for the hand of the Puritan never 
beautified anything), — who, at the end, created the 
Prayer Book. Of him, the not over-reverent his- 
torian of our times says, and I cannot refrain from 
quoting it: 

" No plunder of church or crown had touched the 
hands of Cranmer ; no fibre of political intrigue, or 
crime, or conspiracy could be traced to the Palace of 
Lambeth. As the translation of the Bible bears upon 
it the imprint of the mind of Tyndale, so, while the 
Church of England stands, the image of Cranmer will 
be seen reflected on the calm surface of the Liturgy. 
The most beautiful portions of it are translations from 
the Breviary ; yet the same prayers translated by 
others would not be those which chime like church 
bells in the ears of the English child. The addresses, 
which are original, have the same silvery melody of 
language and breathe the same simplicity of spirit. 
Edward VI. died before the Liturgy could be tampered 
with ; and from amidst the foul weeds in which its 
roots were buried, stands up beautiful the one admira- 
ble thing which this unhappy reign produced." 

This was in 1549. Then came 1552, with the influ- 
ences of the ultra-Eeformers, shrinking from sacra- 
ments and priestly offices ; and then Queen Elizabeth, 
neither the one thing nor the other. But the Prayer 
Book of Cranmer is the ojpus princeps. It is the " Mar- 
tyr's Monument." 



86 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

Looking at it, let me repeat, not theologically, but 
artistically, one cannot but regret a part of the Ee- 
formers' purgation. It may be heresy — it may be super- 
stition — but it is "poetry," to pray for the dead, for 
the repose of the soul, for the tranquil passage over the 
dark water. Bishop Hall deliberately recognized it as 
sound practice, and the ancient office is preserved, 
though not in use. It is very simple and very beauti- 
ful. Of it all, but a small and doubtful fragment is 
left to us. No one who has lost a friend, be it yester- 
day or years ago, — a wife, or mother, or loving child, — 
can suppress utterly an emotion and a hope when in 
the prayer for the church militant he hears : " We also 
bless thy holy name for all thy servants departed this 
life in thy faith and fear." This is all the rough, rude 
thing called " Eeformation" has permitted to survive. 
Had the one green leaf or flower been seen, it would 
have been rooted out. 

In exactly a century, the Liturgy, which had with- 
stood Puritanism, as it were, insinuated, encountered 
it triumphant, and, as ever, intolerant, and by an 
ordinance of Cromwell's Parliament, in 1644, the 
Prayer Book was absolutely suppressed in public, and 
it was made penal to use it in private. In 1645, Pres- 
byterianism, in its most austere form, was established, 
and " to preach, write, or print anything in derogation 
or depraving of its directory," subjected the offender to 
discretionary fine. Then came the Eestoration, and 
the ineffectual Savoy Conference, and finally the re- 
vision of 1661 ; and the story of the Anglican Liturgy 
is told. The revisers spoke, gravely but not harshly, 
of the recent past. " By Avhat undue means," say they, 



THE PRATER BOOK. 87 

"and for what mischievous purposes, the use of the 
Liturgy, though enjoined by the laws of the land, and 
those never yet repealed, came, during the late un- 
happy confusions, to be discontinued, is too well 
known to the world, and we are not willing here to 
remember." 

Our American deflection from the standards, though 
a necessary, was a clumsy one. The political crisis 
required changes in those parts of the Liturgy which 
were political, and here it should have ended; but 1785 
was not a propitious moment, with the fires of civil war 
hardly cooled, and there were then no very thorough 
scholars in the church, or, unless imported, in the 
land, or what may be termed refined critics in the 
unepiscopal body which had to assume the function 
of revision. There was the mild and tolerant wisdom 
of White and Prevost, sure to avoid or round off", as it 
were, any sharp points. Doctor William Smith, of 
Maryland, formerly of Pennsylvania, a good scholar, but 
a rugged, perverse, and disappointed man, seems to have 
done most of the work. The convention made war 
upon adverbs and pronouns and particles. As if for 
the mere purpose of change, they suppressed through- 
out, the good, substantive pronoun " them," even where 
it occurs in the Lord's Prayer, a transcript of the text 
of Scripture, and substituted the feeble adjective 
" those." In the Litany and prayer for the President 
(as if iu anticipation of to-day, when no such special 
supplication is needed) they struck out " wealth" and 
put in "prosperity." They omitted the duty of the 
bishops in consecration " to punish all unquiet and 
criminous men;" and, as if they detected satire in the 



88 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

prayer for the clergy that he alone could help them 
" who workest great marvels," altered it by a peri- 
phrasis. They spoiled it almost everywhere, and yet, 
by an odd oversight, left untouched a single word in 
the Litany which, but for success, would have had an 
awkward sound for some of them. That word is 
" rebellion." 

It was originally an unnatural graft on the Anglican 
liturgy. " Eebellion" is not now, and never was, a 
moral wrong. It is the worst of Jesuitism to say that 
criminality depends on events. "Sedition and privy 
conspiracy" are sins from which all may pray to be 
delivered. " Rebellion" was in no ancient liturgy. " It 
was added," says Bishop Cosin, almost with a blush, 
"for obvious reasons, in 1661" — that is, when Charles 
II. Avas restored, and the regicides, living, wei-e pun- 
ished, and, dead, were disinterred ; and revolt against 
" Sacred Majesty" was a crime indeed. It never ought 
to have had a place in any form of prayer, and least of 
all in ours. Good Mr. Seabury, who but nine years 
before had piloted the King's troops, Hessians and all, 
in pursuit of "Eebels" through Westchester County, 
must have grimly smiled, and Odell, from his retreat 
in Nova Scotia, chuckled, when the fathers of the 
American Church at Philadelphia determined to retain 
the Jacobite prayer against "rebellion." There it is; 
and, no doubt, during our " late unhappy confusions" 
both sides prayed lustily to be delivered from this 
deadly sin. 

The convention tried, in their own words, " to make 
such alterations as to render it consistent with the 
American Revolution and the constitutions of the sev- 



THE PRATER BOOK. 89 

eral States" (there were no United States then) ; and 
when they had done their work, they seemed to think 
they had done too much, for, said they, in their depre- 
catory address to the Anglican bishops, " We liope you 
will not disclaim a branch of your church merely for 
having been, in your lordships' opinion, if that should 
be the case, rather more closely pruned than the sepa- 
ration made absolutely necessary." There were Amer- 
ican mitres in suspense then, and it was necessary to 
be very deferential. Nor was it in vain ; for, thanks 
to the good sense of Mr. Pitt and the Primate, the 
well-deserved honour was bestowed ungrudgingly 
upon the two who, though "rebels," were American 
churchmen, and Doctor Seabury was compelled to go 
northward and resort for his promotion to all that 
were left of the Scottish non-jurors. 

Such is "The Prayer Book," critically and histor- 
ically. Of it, hundreds of thousands are printed and 
sold every year in our land. Its value cannot be over- 
estimated. It is the safeguard of ecclesiastical disci- 
pline. It is the " cheap defence" of the church. It is the 
buoy for which the pilot steers, and it shows where the 
anchor lies. There is scarcely a home among the 
educated where it is not to be found. Its words are 
ftimiliar in every ear. Its forms hallow our daily life. 
It tells, in its ceremonies, of birth, and baptism, and 
marriage, and death. The blushing bride and the 
happy lover hear it. The mother prays from it over 
tlie cradle of her babe, and with it the child follows the 
parent to the grave. 



1 



AUTOGRAPHS. 



The lineal though degenerate descendant of an 
autograph-hunter, pure and simple, I take to be a 
collector of " postage stamps." Numismatics have 
some real interest, but mere autograph hunting is the 
lowest form of innocent intellectual pursuit. Nine 
times out of ten, the collector is ignorant of the true 
value of what he so eagerly pursues, knows little or 
nothing of them whose scribbling he covets, and ac- 
cepts on faith the signature of any one he is told is 
famous. Then, too, according to my observation, a 
professional autograph-hunter is of very easy morals. 
An autograph is a sort of " umbrella" of literature 
which any one has a right to appropriate, and, for 
its sake, many a precious volume has been muti- 
lated by the spoiler. Yet, within limits, autographs 
have an interest and a charm. When Angelo Mai in 
the Vatican, or the German archsBologist in the Illyrian 
monastery, unrolled (if that be the process) the pal- 
impsests, and, as it were, looked the buried Cicero and 
Pliny in the face, one envies the emotion. The un- 
ravelling of the charred papyri in the Neapolitan 
museums, worthless as thus far the results have proved, 
and the disclosure of Greek characters written eighteen 
hundred years ago, and slowly rescued from tlie cinders 
of Vesuvius, is noble autograph-hunting. Then, too, 



AUTOGRAPHS. 91 

the other German scholar who found a manuscript of 
the gospels (autograph of somebody) on the summit or 
the slopes of Mount Sinai, dating as far back as Con- 
stantine, and unknown to general Christendom for 
fifteen centuries, — from A. d. 331 to 1844, — surely he 
had his reward. One must be a very clod who can 
look without at least curiosity on the signatures of 
Guy, or, as he wrote it, Guido Faux, before and after 
the rack — every letter quivering with recent agony, 
and the surname a desperate and illegible scrawl ; or 
Milton's Lycidas at Trinity College ; or the letter, which 
Mr, Hillard tells us of, from the Venetian ambassador to 
Pope Sixtus, giving the news of Henry IV.'s assassina- 
tion by Ravaillac. But for these, some knowledge and 
not a little imagination are required, and to neither, 
according to my experience, does the technical auto- 
gramaniac pretend. 

Faith in genuineness is needed. Like the fair one 
of antiquity, an autograph must not even be suspected. 
But here let me for a moment pause and ask, by what 
line are the territories of what we do and do not believe 
divided ? Where, in the domain of the past, are we to 
cease to believe in the genuineness of a relic, or an 
autograph as a kind of relic ? Nobody donbts the gen- 
uineness of the huge integuments wliich encased the 
hands of Mr. Lincoln on that Good Friday night when 
Booth shot him in the theatre, and which are reli- 
giously preserved at Washington. The bullet which, 
in 1848, killed the poor Archbishop on the Paris bar- 
ricades, is enshrined at Notre Dame, and no one ques- 
tions it. The stump of a pen with which was signed 
the treaty of Paris, a century ago, is preserved. The 



92 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

robes worn by Thomas a Becket, when he came to 
grief at Canterbury, are to be seen at Sens; and at 
Mihm is a lock of Lucrezia Borgia's hair (" only a 
woman's hair," as Swift said of poor Esther Johnson's) 
— that which, Leigh Hunt somewhere teils us, " sur- 
vives like love — so light, so soft, so escaping from the 
idea of death, with which we may almost look up to 
heaven, commune Avith the angelic nature, and say, 
I have a piece of thee, not unworthy of thy being now." 
As I have said, the tresses of the beautiful poisoner 
of history and Donizetti survive four hundred years. 
Where, then, on the records or among the traditions 
of the past, do we enter the region of doubt and de- 
nial ? and is the Church of Rome absolutely irrational 
in asking for faith in relics of more dim antiquity ? 

It has never fallen in my Avay to see truly antique 
autographs. The Solemn League and Covenant, I have 
seen. There are few of any Talue here, except what 
was once Mr. Teft's and is now Dr. Sprague's. A little 
collection lies before me which, if the reader will par- 
don such trifling, is, or may be made suggestive. They 
cover more than a century of stirring times. But that 
they are suggestive, they would be valueless, at least 
to me. They are autographs and holographs. 

Just a hundred and fifty years ago — for he died, 
luckily for himself, in 1721 — lived a public man, with 
an unmusical name; a minister of the crown, over 
whom, when death came to the rescue, hung the 
penalty of parliamentary impeachment. Such was 
James Craggs, the friend of Stanhope and of Pope, and 
Secretary of State to George the First. Around his 
memory hang the dismal crimes and follies of the South 



AUTOGRAPHS. 93 

Sea scheme, but, as I look on a letter with the date and 
post-mark of November 5, 1720, just before the ex- 
plosion and the shipwreck, with the address to " John 
Newsham, Esq., Member of Parliament, Warwickshire," 
and " J. Craggs" in the corner, there comes from the 
grave of the Past a strain of familiar melody, falling 
gently on the heart, and making one willing to forget 
the jarring agonies of his close of life : 

" Statesman, yet friend to truth, of soul sincere ; 
In action faithful, and in honour clear ; 
Who broke no promise, sen'cd no private end ; 
Who gain'd no title, and who lost no friend ; 
Ennobled by himself, by all approved ; 
Praised, wept, and honour'd by the Muse he loved." 

Coincidently, or nearly so, with Craggs, comes a hol- 
ograph of Lord Chesterfield — a letter to David Mallet, 
dated at " Bath, March ye 9th, 1748." It is deliciously 
characteristic, stately in its high-bred courtesy, and 
yet graceful ; with none of the patronizing tone of the 
peer to the relatively humble author and editor ; doing 
or promising a kindness readily, and mingling with it 
that sort of pleasant gossip which is so well adapted 
to j)ut parties on an equality. Then, too, familiar 
names of literature and politics float pleasantly on its 
surface, and bring back the old-fashioned associations 
of that day — Pelham, then Prime Minister, and Lit- 
tleton, and Gray's friend "West, and Thomson of the 
" Seasons." It begins with pleasantry and genial sym- 
pathy. Mallet suffering, it seems, from an opthalmic 
ailment. " I can say to you now without a compli- 
ment what I could not with truth have said to you 



94: AMONG MY BOOKS. 

some years ago — which is, that I do not know a pair 
of eyes in which I interest myself so much as I do in 
yours. I use the word ' interest* very properly, for it 
is from the use of your eyes I expect the best employ- 
ment of my own." Then follows, as if to take aAvay 
or defer anything like patronizing, gossip as to his own 
political retirement, and the speculations of the "cof- 
fee-house tables" (for clubs were not) on the subject. 
One sentence I quote, not so much for its cleverness, 
but for some peculiarities of expression which, we may 
regret, have gone out of fashion. I preserve the spell- 
ing and the capital letters. " Lord Chesterfield would 
be C(Bsar or nothing, says a Spirited Politician ; There 
is something more in this affair than we yet know, 
says a deeper. He expects to be called again, says 
a third. While the silent Pantomimical Politician 
shrugs everything eventually, and is sure not to be 
disproved at last. They are all wellcome, let them 
account for my present situation how they please ; this 
I know and they do not, that I feel and enjoy the com- 
fort of it." He then tells Mallet what he had done for 
him — how he had interceded with the cautious Prime 
Minister. " Our conversation ended, as all those con- 
versations do, Avitli general assurances on his part that 
he would do for you when he could. None but he who 
gives these assurances can know the reall value of 
them ; for he could not say more if he meant to realize 
them, and he would not say less if he did not." This 
letter is, I believe, in print; but as it lies before me, 
with its faded, gilt-edged paper, and its perfectly fresh 
ink, shed a hundred and twelve years ago; its clear, 
distinct handwriting (the importance of which he so 



A UTOGRAPIIS. 95 

urged upon his ungracious boy) ; its prodigal use of 
consonants; for the wretched clipping system was 
not then in vogue — his "affraid" and "transmitt" 
and " Wellcome" and "reall" and "faithfull," it is no 
great strain on fancy to go back to South Audley 
Street, where Chesterfield House, as he planned it, still 
stands intact, or to Bath and the Pump-room and Beau 
Nash, and see again this kind-hearted, brilliant, high- 
-spirited gentleman, — for such he was, in spite of Mrs. 
Oliphant, — and to breathe the radiant atmosphere 
which habitual courtesy generated around him. Hon- 
our, I say defiantly, to the memory of a patriot, when 
patriotism was rare; a statesman, a scholar, a loving, 
anxious parent, — for such he was, as if to repair an 
aboriginal wrong to a most ungracious boy, — and the 
writer, in my poor judgment, of the best English prose 
of liis times — better than Boliugbroke's and as good 
as Swift's ! There have been many real or manufac- 
tui-ed death-bed sayings, but none more genuine and 
characteristic than his. " I die content," said Wolfe 
at Quebec. "Kiss me. Hardy!" whimpered Nelson 
in the cockpit of the Victory. " I still live," said Mr. 
Webster, " Is this death ?" were the words whispered 
by poor angelic Margaret Davidson to her mother, 
and ejaculated by George the Fourth to Sir William 
Knighton, terrified at the coming reality. But " Take 
a chair, Dayrolles," from Chesterfield's dying lips, 
was the last and fitting expiration of a kind and 
gentle spirit which had so long 

" Shone in the small, sweet courtesies of life." 
Passing down the stream of time, as thus illustra- 
ted,— for their handwriting is before me as I write, — 



96 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

Lord Bute, and the Duke of Grafton, and "Jemmy 
Twitcher," and Wilkes (beautiful penmanship), and 
Lord Temple, and George Grenville, and the twin 
suicides Charles Yorke and Lord Olive, my eye rests 
on two, who, contemporaries and rivals, rise grandly 
from the low level of their times, William Murray, 
Pope's " Lost Ovid," and that " fierce cornet of 
horse," or, as his master pleasantly called him, "trum- 
pet of sedition," the elder Pitt — Mansfield and Chat- 
ham. 

Lord Mansfield's letter, written in February, 1767, 
when he was nearly seventy years of age, is a specimen 
of clumsy penmanship, but of graceful, gentlemanly 
style. He had then been eleven years in the high judi- 
cial function which made his fame, and which he was 
destined to exercise for twenty more years — the longest 
judicial tenure, if my memory serves me, ever known 
— the light of serene intellect shining steadily to the 
last. He lived till he was on the edge of his ninth 
decade. Strangely, it occurs to me as I look on the 
blurred, yellow paper before me, do the generations of 
men bind themselves together. Lord Mansfield con- 
versed with a man who had seen Charles I. beheaded, 
and the writer of these notes has in turn talked with 
those, or at least one, now an actual participant in 
this day's doings, who has associated with contempo- 
raries of Mansfield and Chatham, and described their 
chronic bickerings. 

On the 24th June, 1770, Lord Chatham, then at 
Hayes, wrote the words in his bold, masculine hand- 
writing on which my eye now rests. It is addressed 
to Mr. Thomas Nuthall, the eminent solicitor, whose 



AUTOGRAPHS. 97 

death, soon after a conflict with a highwayman on 
Hounslow Heath, is recorded in the police story of 
those days. He was Lord Chatham's " Dear Nuthall." 
Beckford, ancestor of Fonthill and Vathek, who had 
dared to speak brave words of truth to royalty, was 
but three days dead. " I can say nothing," he writes, 
" upon the afflicting loss of Mr. Beckford — my heart is 
too full of it." Beckford, bold and turbulent, was a 
man after Chatham's own heart, and he mourned for 
him sincerely. No public man on the record of Eng- 
land's modern story has attracted more conflicting 
judgments; but still the statue, view it as we may, is 
very gigantic and imposing. The King hated him 
with all the ferocity of a diseased intellect. The 
gossips of politics, such as Horace Walpole, who have 
done so much to make history, were awed by him, and 
praised him involuntarily, \yhere, for instance, is there 
a finer tribute than when he writes to Mason, more 
than ten years after death had claimed Lord Chatham: 
" Admiral Darby has relieved Gibraltar, and the Span- 
iards ran into their burrows, as if Lord Chatham were 
still alive." Yet Walpole was in the habit of calling 
him " old Garrick." Continental writers have done 
full justice. There is a letter somewhere from Turgot 
to Hume, of curious interest, as illustrative of the 
struggles of true political economy a century ago. It 
reads like Cobden : " II serait, cependant, bien a desirer 
que M. Pitt, et tons ceux qui conduisent les nations 
pensassent comme nous sur tons les pointes. J'ai bien 
peur que votre fameux demagogue ne suive des prin- 
cipes.tout difierens, et ne se croie interesse a entreteuir 
dans votre nation le prejuge que vous avez appele 

5 



98 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

* jealousy of trade.' Ce serait grand malheur pour les 
deux nations. Je crois cependant, I'epuisement assez 
egal de part et d'autre pour que cette folie ne fut pas 
longue!" It is a French writer of our day, as unlike 
Chatham " as I to Hercules/ who does him most exact 
justice. "He expanded," says Lamartiue, "the space 
of Parliament to the proportions of his own character 
and his own language. He was a public man in all 
the greatness of the phrase — the soul of a nation 
personified in an individual — the inspiration of a 
people in the heart of a patrician. His oratory had 
something as grand as his action. It was the heroic 
in language. The echoes of Lord Chatham's words 
were heard, were felt, all over the continent," 

But my autographs prompt other and gentler 
thoughts than of Chatham as he fulmined over 
Europe — of him as a father and husband and friend — 
a friend, too, to us, for he refused to let his son draw a 
sword against American "rebels." In 1769, as letters 
not yet published show, Lord Chatham retired with 
his family to Chevening, the seat of his son-in-law, in 
Kent, the oAvner being absent in Italy. There we read, 
in the letters of a domestic, very homely details. "The 
young gentlemen and ladies have had a dancing-mas- 
ter from town twice a week ever since they have been 
here. Lady Chatham has been so kind as to send for 
my wife and me to see their performance, which was 
exceedingly clever, and which we took as a great favour 
from her ladyship. Lord Pitt's birthday Avas last Mon- 
day sennight, Avliich was kept here, and a ball at 
night given to the servants. Lady Hester's (' after- 
ward the weird hermit of Damascus') is to-day, which 



AUTOGRAPHS. 99 

will be kept in the same manner, with a ball at night, 
so that we have of late lived wonderful merry, and 
everything has been quite agreeable. It Avas doubted 
some few days ago that Lord Chatham was going to 
have a fit of the gout, but it proved to be nothing but 
his overtiring himself with playing at billiards with 
the young gentlemen and ladies, Avhich occasioned a 
little pain in his ankle." Nor does the Earl write less 
familiarly, though always with a Chathamic twang. 
He plans a new walk inthe park, — to this day shown 
as " Lord Chatham's Drive," — and thus refers to it : 
" I recommend the immediate execution of this essen- 
tial work. If I can be of any use in conjunction with 
Mr. Brampton, I shall think myself honoured if you 
will appoint me joint overseer of the way, almost the 
only office an old cripple is fit for. I carry my ambi- 
tion to be remembered at Chevening so far that I wish 
it may be said hereafter, if ever this plan for the road 
should go into execution. He, the overseer, who made 
this way, did not make the Peace of Paris." And then 
he adds, referring to his son, "My poor William is still 
ailing, but, thank God, is much better, so that we can 
leave him without anxiety next week." 

There is in England a form of memorial which has 
never been to any extent introduced into this country 
— plaster casts of the countenances of the dead. They 
are very ghastly, but strangely impressive, and not 
life but death-like. Two are preserved at Chevening 
of this great father and great son. Lord Chatham's 
face is twisted by paralysis, showing unmistakeably the 
character of the blow which smote him on the field of 
his fame, on that April day ninety-three years ago ; 



100 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

while Mr. Pitt's fearful attenuation and expressitn 
of misery is as sad a sight as these eyes ever looked 
upon. 

My autograph of the younger Pitt, illustrative of his 
happy and convivial tendencies, is brief enough to be 
quoted. The penmanship is very neat. The letter is 
addressed to the first Lord Carrington, then rejoicing 
in the simple patronymic of " Mr. Kobert Smith :" 

" Dear Smith : Not having made the party I in- 
tended for to-day, I shall be glad if you "vvill give me 
leave to recall my excuse, and to dine with you unless 
your table is full. Ever yours, W. Pitt. 

" Saturday morning." 

The autographic roll I might call must not be too 
much prolonged ; nor have I ventured on American 
subjects — Franklin's really beautiful penmanship, and 
Washington's fine, manly, surveyor's round-hand, with 
his profuse capitals and his obsolete but not incorrect 
spelling; and" Old Put's" autographical monstrosities. 
There is room for but one or two more illustrations from 
abroad. These lie before me — Cobbett's bold, clear, 
distinct writing, not a word too many, not a phrase 
uncertain, in the blackest of ink, and on the toughest 
of paper ; and, by way of contrast, the daintiest little 
note of Samuel Eogers, as late as 1846, when he was 
among the " eighties," and yet as neatly written and 
expressed as if it were a young man's love-letter : 

" I wish I could tell you what I felt when I read 
your very, very kind letter. Happy indeed should I 
be, if I could pass a day or two under your roof. But 
I dare not say yes — and yet you must not start if you 



AUTOGRAPHS. 101 

receive another saying that small and terrific mono- 
syllable. Pray, pray forgive me, and remember me to 
one who requires no reminding — who, like yourself, 
never forgets a friend. Sincerely yours, 
" October 14, 1846. Samuel Kogeks." 

One other, and my illustrative gossip is done. In 
the following, the name of the bearer is alone sup- 
pressed, and the reader is begged to note the charac- 
teristic precaution of the Great Captain against mid- 
night intrusion : 

"London", June 20, 1842. - 

" Mks. Cross : I beg you to shew my liouse to 

and his friends on Wednesday, the 23d June, at twelve 
o'clock at noon. Yours, etc., Wellington." 

Eesolute to abstain in these illustrations from any 
reference to the living, some that are very precious 
have been laid aside, with the chance that he who pens 
these notes may be among the departed before the 
writers, whose words he cherishes, are called away. But 
as this little essay has been in progress, a knell from a 
distance tells me that, in one case, the reason for reserve 
has ceased. The great soldier of America, — for such 
history, when our miserable bickerings are forgotten, 
will pronounce him ; the Christian gentleman ; the 
knightly leader of chivalry, not less glorious because 
unfortunate ; the man whom in his grave all, truly 
brave and good, mourn and honour, — Eobert E. Lee, of 
Virginia, is dead; and, as these lines are written, is 
going to his grave, by the side of Jackson, at Lexing- 
ton. His autographs lie before me ; the penmanship 



102 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

graceful and delicate, like a woman's, and his words 
those of modesty and simple truth. 

As early as the 10th of November, 1865, he writes 
to a friend : 

" I concur with you entirely as to the importance 
of a true history of the war ; and it is my purpose, 
unless prevented, to write that of the campaigns in 
Virginia. With this view I have been engaged since 
the cessation of hostilities in endeavouring to procure 
the necessary official information. All my records, 
reports, returns, etc., with the headquarters of the 
army, were needlessly destroyed by the clerks having 
them in charge on the retreat from Petersburg, and 
such as had been forwarded to the War Department in 
Eichmond were either destroyed in its conflagration or 
captured at the South in the attempt to save them. I 
desire to obtain some vouchers in support of my recol- 
lection, or I should have made some progress in the 
narrative. I have not even my letter or order books 
to which to refer. I have thought it„possible that 
some of my official correspondence, which would be of 
value to me, might be found among the captured 
records in Washington, and that General Grant, who 
possesses magnanimity as well as ability, might cause 
me to be furnished with copies. I have, however, 
hesitated to approach him on the subject, as it is one 
in which he would naturally feel no interest." 

On the 28th December, 1866, he writes : 

"If you see Mr. Davis, I beg that you will present 
to him my Avarmest regards ; and, if you can find fit 



AUTOGRAPHS. 103 

•words to express it, my deep interest in his welfare. 
Yon say rightly, that nothing can be done by his 
friends for his relief, and that adds to the bitterness 
of my distress ; for I feel that any attempt only serves 
to arouse afresh the slumbering ire of his opponents. 
We must, therefore, be hopeful, but patient." 

As late as the 11th of June, 1869, he says: 

" I feel more strongly than I can describe the impor- 
tance of a true history of the events of the war between 
the Northern and the Southern States, and had re- 
solved to prepare a narrative of the military occur- 
rences in Virginia. I have not changed my purpose, 
but at first thought the time was unpropitious. The 
passions of neither section had sufficiently cooled to 
hear the truth, the only thing I cared to relate. I do 
not think that time has arrived yet, but it is approach- 
ing. I have been collecting facts, but am at a loss in 
consequence of my records, papers, etc., having been 
destroyed, and have been so situated as to be incapable 
of supplying them. Still I am doing something and 
hope to succeed." 

These were almost his last words ; and they speak 
as a legacy to the South to do an unfulfilled duty, 
which a reconciled people will have a right to demand. 
As for him, though it may be that 

" his triumphs will be sung 

By some unmoulded tongue, 

Far on in summers that we shall not see," 

the duty of surviving contemporaries is to prepare the 
record for the future. And who can better do this 



104 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

work, illuminate this holy scroll, than the accomplished 
scholar and brave soldier who, I see, helped to bear the 
pall of Lee, and in whose veins flows the blood of the 
great general who fell at Shiloh ?* 

With these saddened words I end my gossip about 
" Autographs." 

* " During his last illness it was sometimes my sad duty to minis- 
ter to his needs. I feel that in an assembly where every heart throbs 
with sorrow for our departed chieftain, I violate no confidence by 
adverting to a death-bed every way worthy of the life it ended. Once 
in the solemn watches of the night, when I handed him the prescribed 
nourishment, he turned upon me a look of friendly recognition, and 
then cast down his eyes with such a sadness in them that I can never 
forget it. But he spoke not a word ; and this not because he was 
unable, for when he chose he did speak brief sentences with distinct 
enunciation, but because, before friends or family physicians feared 
the impending stroke, he saw the open portals of death, and chose to 
wrap himself in an unbroken silence as he went down to enter them, 
lie, against whom no man could charge, in a long life, a word that 
should not have been spoken, chose to leave the deeds of that life to 
speak for him. To me, this woeful silence, this voiceless majesty, was 
the grandest feature of that grand death." — William Preston Johnson's 
speech at Richmond, November 4, 1 870. 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 



The transition from Chesterfield to Cobbett is a 
sharp one. It is going from the gilded drawing-room 
and the daintiest boudoir, where courtiers and fair 
women move gracefully, and are bewiggedand bepoAV- 
dered in all the cosmetic horrors of a century ago, to 
the humblest yeoman's cottage in the land, or eating 
bread and cheese under a hedge in the companion- 
ship of plain men and plainer women. To be honest 
— so artificial has this world of ours become — we rather 
like the drawing-room best; and, without disparage- 
ment of open air and fresh breezes and simple cottage 
or wayside food, prefer a dinner at Delmonico's. Drop- 
ping, however, these esculent illustrations, and not 
meaning to forswear literary allegiance to the distant 
past, let me annotate a strange book of practical and 
impracticable wisdom, — the only one of the authors I 
am familiar with, though old enough to remember 
Cobbett and with a dim memory of having seen him 
in the flesh, — his " Instructions" to " Young Men." 

It is full — say the critics — of sound advice and 
" charming" personal and autobiographical recollec- 
tions. Let us look at the last first. If to be truthful 
be charming, then are they so ; but there is a rude 
homeliness in these revelations, an unconventionality 

5* 



106 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

which scarcely reaches the level of fascination. I do 
not read the book with pleasure, though I do with 
interest. I do not love the man " Cobbett" any more 
than I do the man, of the earth, earthy,— Benjamin 
Franklin. Neither Peter Porcupine nor Poor Kichard 
win me. One goes back to graceful, truly fascinat- 
ing Philip Stanhope, pretty much as, after looking at 
the Cardiff giant, had it been real, or Mr. Lincoln in 
Union Square (who, in ugliness, is all reality), we 
crave a glimpse of the Tribune in Florence, or the 
Venus of the Louvre, Yet Cobbett proves himself 
always a robust and often a gentle man; and, amid his 
ostentatious coarseness, writes sweetly. Contrast, for 
example, his wretched, or, to use his own favourite 
adjective, "beastly" denunciation of vaccination — 
"cow-pox," as he calls it — with the perfectly lovely 
passage as to the love of children : 

" Having," says he, " gotten over those thorny places 
as quickly as possible, I gladly come back to the babies, 
with regard to whom I shall have no prejudices, no 
affectation, no false pride, no sham fears to encounter; 
every heart (except there be one made of flint) being 
with me here. 'There were then brought to him little 
children that he should put his hands on them and 
pray; and the disciples rebuked them.' But Jesus 
said, ' Suffer little children and forbid them not, for of 
such is the kingdom of heaven.' And where is the 
man, — the woman who is not fond of babies is not 
worthy the name, — but where is the man who does not 
feel his heart softened, who does not feel himself be- 
come gentler, who does not lose all the hardness of his 
temper, when, in any way, for any purpose, or by any- 



WILLIAM COBBETT. lOY 

body, an appeal is made to him in behalf of these so 
helpless and so perfectly innocent little creatures?" 

He hates music (no wonder he did not like Shakes- 
peare) — a love of which he speaks of "as a mark of 
great weakness, great vacuity of mind ;" but then, he 
says — for if the ear was dull, the eye was very bright 
and the fancy active: — " No man shall ever make me 
believe that those who reared the Cathedral of Ely 
(wliich I saw the other day) were rude either i n their 
manners, or in their minds or words." He writes 
almost filthily about female ailments and necessities, 
but then he says— and what gallant courtier could do 
it more gracefully ? — " With a young and inexperi- 
enced wife, you should bear in mind that the first 
frown she receives from you is a dagger in her heart." 

But in vindicating the opinion that any one, ordi- 
narily and humanly constituted, is not " charmed" by 
Cobbett, I am wandering from the glimpses of auto- 
biography. His was a strange, and unless, as is quite 
possible, its fruits ripen by-and-by, an unprofitable life, 
and in notliing more strange than in his fragmentary 
connection, as it Avere, with this country. He was 
just old enough — born in 1762 — to remember, as a 
lad, the American "Rebellion." I find no trace of his 
being impressed, as poor Haydon was, by the bitterness 
of animosity wliicli inflamed even the popular English 
heart against the revolting colonies. It was terribly 
fierce; infected " loyal" women ; and Avas, though in 
degree milder, not unlike the peculiar sentiment which 
took possession of female minds during our recent 
"troublous times," and which still burns sullenly in 
certain regions. Haydon, in his diary — saddest of all 



108 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

printed books— has this entry : " My grandfather (who 
was very fond of painting) married 3Iary Baskerville, 
a descendant of the printer. She was a woman of 
great energy and violent prejudices. She hated the 
French, and she hated the Americans; and once, when 
an American prisoner, who had escaped, crept into her 
house and appealed to her for protection until pursuit 
was over, though alone in the house, she told him she 
hated all Americans and rebels, and turned the poor 
fellow into the street." This, I repeat, sounds like 
feminine " loyalty" nearer home, and of recent date. 
If Cobbett, as a young man, had not blood like this in 
his veins, and such bitterness in his heart, there is no 
sign of sympathy with those who struggled for freedom 
here. He came to America as a private soldier in 
1786, and the soil on which he put. his foot was the 
province of New Brunswick, most loyal of all depend- 
encies originally, and made more so by the emigration 
of the refugees from the revolted colonies. Tliither 
fled the Sewalls and others of New England, and Odell 
and the ribald Tories of the middle States, and thence, 
before they became slowly reconciled to the inevitable 
and irreversible, did they shoot sharp and poisoned 
arrows at their victorious brethren. With men of 
their position in society, the private soldier did not 
presume to associate, but, as he tells us, among plainer 
folks of the same political sect, he found a welcome. 
"I had got into the house of one of those Yankee 
loyalists who, at the close of the Eevolutionary War 
(called a Kebellion till it succeeded) had accepted of 
grants of land in the King's Province of New Bruns- 
wick; and who, to the great honour of England, had 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 109 

been furnished with all the means of making new and 
comfortable homes." When, later in life, he came to 
Philadelphia, it is not difficult to measure his sympathy. 
The very first words of his "Porcupine," dated in 1794, 
are enough to start the buried Fathers of the Eepublic 
from their forgotten graves — to make Mr. Lossing and 
our historical societies gnash their teeth and tear their 
sparse hair, and delight to their inmost souls the tribe 
of to-day's slander-mongers. " The Congress," says he, 
" which began and conducted to its close that rebellion 
which severed thirteen flourishing and favoured colonies 
of America from the Kingdom of Great Britain, was a 
compound of men who, in point of craftiness, surpassed 
the Eoundheads of England, and in point of enter- 
prise and perseverance far outstripped the Jacobins of 
France. If ever history, freed from the shackles which 
they and their English abettors have imposed on her, 
should record their conduct in the language of truth, 
she will tell the selfish motives by which they were 
stimulated to seduce a loyal people from their allegiance 
to the most just and most merciful of kings ; she will 
detect the fallacy of their pretensions; she will expose 
their close-veiled hypocrisy and ambition ; and their 
measures of hostility and persecution she will write in 
letters of blood." This is pretty strong language; and 
dismal volumes are these " Porcupines." It was only 
in an abnormal state of society, such as existed in 
Philadelphia, and perhaps everywhere in the shadow 
of the new-born institutions from 1793 to 1800 — the 
limit of Cobbett's residence — that such things would 
be tolerated and encouraged. When, a few years later, 
they came to be collected and republished by subscrip- 



110 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

tion, any one familiar with the social condition here 
will see how completely respectable people of all sides 
shrank from the contact. They are vigorous, for he 
could not write feebly; they were occasionally eloquent, 
but they were ferocious. He seizes a political adver- 
sary, and, after he has stabbed him and felled him, he 
dances, in his savage way, around him, and hacks and 
hews him with a demoniac exultation to which there 
is no parallel, unless it be a China brave disembowel- 
ling and cutting off the breasts of a Sister of Charity 
at Tieu-tsin. There is no exaggeration in this picture 
of his truculent rhetoric. 

My eye lights, as I write, on a favourable specimen 
of his fierce eloquence on an impersonal theme, which, 
for reasons I need not give, has its interest now : 

" A tender law is the devil When I trust a man a 
sum of money, I expect he will return the value. 
That legislature which says my debtor may pay me 
with one-third of the value he received, commits a 
deliberate act of villainy — an act for which an indi- 
vidual in any government would be honoured with a 
whipping-post, and in some governments with a gal- 
lows. When a man makes dollars of which one-third 
part only is silver, he must lose his ears. But legisla- 
tures can, with the solemn faces of rulers and guardians 
of justice, boldly give currency to an adulterated coin, 
enjoin it upon debtors to cheat their creditors, and 
enforce their systematic knavery. My countrymen, 
the devil is among you. Make paper as much as you 
please. Make it a tender in all future contracts, or let 
it rest on its own credit — but remember that past 
contracts are sacred things." 



WILLIAM COBBETT. Ill 

There was fierce honesty in what he did — as, for 
example, when a young Philadelphia doctor, who had 
received kindness at the hands of the Governor of 
Pennsylvania, sent Oobbett an anonymous letter, bit- 
terly attacking his patron, and begging that it might 
be printed editorially, the indignant journalist printed 
the correspondence as it came to him, name and all ; 
and the libeller never to the day of his death, long 
after, recovered from it. The venom Avhicli he poured 
upon Doctor Rush, to whom he dedicated a special 
journal, the " Eush Light," was terribly acrid. One 
— albeit used to the charming amenities, just now, 
of the New York press — reads it Avith amazement. 
His error was in assailing professional rather than 
political character. He knew nothing of the anony- 
mous letter to Patrick Henry, and Washington's com- 
ment on it, or he would have used it with terrible 
eff'ect, little as he loved either Henry or Washington. 
But Doctor Rush, mistaken as science has since shoAvn 
his purgative-mercury and wholesale venesection to 
have been, was a great physician and an eloquent 
teacher. In the agonies of 1793 and 1798, when the 
immortal pestilence, for such it seems to be, for it 
has lately hovered near us, desolated Philadelphia, 
and was so frightful in its ravages that, like De Foe's 
plague, it has been made the subject of romance, 
Doctor Rush remained at his post, and no soldier on 
the battle-field ever showed greater courage and stead- 
iness than did he in his daily and nightly pilgrimages 
through the then unpaved streets and alleys of his 
native city. His patients, one and all, worshipped 
him, and the tradition of his genial manners in the 



112 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

sick-room still makes people blind to the grievous and 
palpable defects of his moral nature. Hence was it 
that Cobbett's attack, directed at his enemy's strong 
point, failed and recoiled. It brought him, too, in 
conflict with the processes of the laAV, just then wielded 
by one whom Cobbett had vilified, and who was of 
that rugged nature Avhich, having a substantial griev- 
ance, never forgets or forgives — not the Pharisaic 
unforgiveness of such men or women, as never do 
wrong and never forgive those who do, and Avho are 
so nice as to be nasty, but a robust vindictiveness 
which (not unlike Cobbett's, by the way) persecutes 
to the end. Such was the Chief-Justice of Pennsyl- 
vania — Thomas McKean — an honest, brave, violent, 
revengeful man. Him, as I have said, Cobbett had 
attacked with the full force of his coarse eloquence. 
He had upbraided him with judicial murder in the 
treason trials of 1 778. He had twitted him with his 
notorious domestic infelicities, classic from the days 
of Socrates to Lord Cowper's; he had, in short, ex- 
asperated an inflammable nature to the explosive 
point, when he became a defendant-litigant before 
him, being indicted for libel, and, if ever there was 
such a thing as a libel, being singularly guilty. 
The story of that litigation is inappropriate here, the 
end being that Cobbett became outlaw and exile from 
his adopted home. He never forgave Philadelphia, 
and even in the little book which was meant to be the 
text of these notes, printed in 1880, I detect a fling at 
Philadelphia society at which one cannot refrain from 
emiling. " It used to be remarked," says he, " in 
Philadelphia when I lived there, that there was not a 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 113 

single man of any eminence, whether doctor, laAvyer, 
merchant, trader, or anything €lse, that had not been 
born and bred in the country and of parents in a low 
state of life." 

The prejudice against an English radical never has 
quite died out in this country of ours, and for it, Cob- 
bett is largely responsible ; and when, in our day, on 
foreign radicalism was engrafted the poisonous shoot 
of abolitionism, the growth, in the eye of good taste at 
least, is strangely unpleasant. Very different has been, 
as we all knoAv, the fate of our Celtic radicals, and no- 
where, in one instance, more so than in the city which 
Cobbett afflicted. An Irish exile came to Philadelphia, 
with a temper as impetuous and a pen as active, who 
hated the English government quite as cordially; and 
wrote books and pamphlets without number to express 
that hatred — a " Papist" too. He came about the time 
Cobbett did, but, unlike Cobbett, assimilated at once 
with those around him, was an active and useful 
citizen, made no lasting enemies by his controversies 
and many friends by his kindnesses (among whom the 
writer, then a boy, gratefully records himself), and left 
behind a name that is honoured, and descendants 
who, in spite of economical hobbies and heresies, are 
esteemed and beloved for their personal virtues. I 
speak of Matthew Carey. In his day an Irishman was 
not the Pariah which Radical and Protestant fanati- 
cism is now seeking to make him. 

Cobbett returned once more to this country, — an 
old man, and, according to his own showing, on a 
wretched errand, — to dig up Tom Paine's bones at New 
Hochello and carry them as sacred relics to England. 



114 A3I0NG MY BOOKS. 

Tt Avas indecent, ineffectual mockery. As was caid 
long ago, " the bones of the scoffer were looked on by 
such of the British people as knew anything about 
them, with no more regard or sentiment than the 
anatomical student bestows on the unknown subject 
before him." The pageant was ungraceful, and taking 
into view the living as well as the dead, it was ludicrous. 

Such were Cobbett's odd relations to this country, 
and such the life which, to a certain though limited 
extent, this little book illustrates. It was, I fear, in 
the general result unprofitable. 

Let me open the book again, now that we know the 
author. While Cobbett, as we have shown (though 
instances might be largely multiplied), was a gentle, 
loving man, he was a model hater. To an individual 
and private man who had wronged him, he could, no 
doubt, be tolerant, but to such public men as had used 
political power to oppress and ruin him, he cherished 
a resentment which, such is the infirmity of our nature, 
and such the clear distinction between public and 
private wrongs, cannot be entirely condemned. Does 
any one imagine or pretend, that the refined and hon- 
ourable gentlemen who, on the night of the 13th of 
of September, 1861, were dragged from their beds in Bal- 
timore, and immured without an accuser for fourteen 
months in Fort Warren, will or ought to forgive the 
men who did it or who connived at it? It would be a 
condonation worse than that of adultery. And who is 
there to blame Cobbett, who, when immured for a polit- 
ical offense in prison, where for two years he lingered, 
says, in speaking of tlie danger to his wife's life from 
their separation : " If such was not the effect of this 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 115 

merciless act of the government toward me, that 
amiable body may be well assured that / have taken 
and recorded the will for the deed, and that as such it 
will live in my memory as long as that memory shall 
last." The italics are Cobbett's, and it recalls a just 
and genial criticism on this " addiction," as it were, of 
his. Usually those who know how to use the English 
language escliew this mode of emphasis. Cobbett, as 
any one will see who opens tins one volume, revels in 
it. Archdeacon Hare, somewhere in his " Guesses of 
Truth," says : " Cobbett is profuse of italics. This 
instance may be supposed to refute the assertion that 
the writers who use them are not versed in the art of 
composition. But though Cobbett was a wonderful 
master of plain speech, all his writings betray his want 
of logical and literary culture. He had never sacrificed 
to the Graces, who cannot be won without many sacri- 
fices. He cared only for strength ; and, as his own 
bodily frame was of the Herculean rather than the 
Apollinian cast, he thought tliat a man could not be 
very strong unless he displayed his thews. Besides, a 
Damascus blade would not have gashed his enemies 
enough for his taste ; he liked to have a few notches 
on his sword." From a man who says that he does 
not like (and he italicizes it) " a slow, soft utterance in 
woman," may be expected the coarse shriek of exulta- 
tion over a fallen victim. The "notched sword" makes 
fearful gashes, as Avhen, speaking of Napoleon, whom 
he detested, he says: "Had he not divorced Josephine, 
or, having done so, married the prettiest and poorest 
girl in France, he would, in all probability, have now 
been on an imperial throne, instead of being eaten by 



116 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

worms at the bottom of a very deep hole in Saint 
Helena." The reference to Sir Samuel Romilly's 
broken-hearted suicide is awful, but very impressive. 

" He never sacrificed to the Graces." Nay, not only 
so, but he shoAved a strong disposition to butcher all 
who did. His literature, from certain indications- 
unconscious croppings out — was greater than he claims 
credit for. He had the affectation of seeking to con- 
ceal, not that he had read much, but his specific 
obligations to books, and above all to deny that he 
ever had " models," or that he was influenced by the 
common judgment about books. Hence, he sneered 
at Shakespeare, and, most illogically, narrates at length 
Ireland's experiment of forgery as evidence of Shakes- 
peare's evil influence. Addison he treats as beneath 
contempt, "feeble and ungrammatical ;" and gives a 
grotesque account of being awakened from a dream of 
enthusiasm by reading Dennis's " Criticism on Cato" 
in a tavern in the backwoods of America, and " burst- 
ing out laughing at the result." Not having read 
"Dennis," which is inaccessible here, I cannot measure 
the force of the criticism, but a hundred and sixty 
years have passed since Dennis lived and wrote, and 
the last Spectator appeared, and Cato was played ; and, 
as I say, I cannot find " Dennis" — and Sir Eoger de 
Coverley and Will Honeycomb, and the criticisms on 
Milton liA'e, and I like (perhaps because it is shorter) 
the " Vision of Mirza" infinitely better than the " Pil- 
grim's Progress." As to " Cato," I concede its dullness, 
but as a Whig play it was a success, and, at intervals, 
it holds its place on the stage down to our times. 
There is dramatic effect in the scene where Cato meets 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 117 

the dead body of his son, and something very like 
poetry in Syphax's description of the Zamian beauties : 

" The sun which rolls his chariot o'er their heads, 
Has flushed their cheeks with more exalted charms. 
When once with these, ray prince, you'll soon forget 
The pale, unripened beauties of the north !" 

It always has seemed to me that "the sullen shot" 
of the distant French in Wolfe's elegy, and Addison's 
(or Andrew Marvel's) "nightly to the listening earth," 
were bright gems of poesy. Those — and there are 
some, doubtless — who prefer gazing on the citadel of 
Gibraltar, with its huge masonry, or the Pyramids, to 
the Taj at Agra, cold, white, useless perhaps, but 
beautiful, rising from the hovels around — may prefer 
Cobbett to Addison, but I have yet a weakness for the 
prim, scholarly, vinous Christian gentleman, who knew 
how to die, leaving behind him rich legacies, Cobbett 
and Dennis to the contrary notwithstanding. "It is 
not," says Landor, "so much his style as the sweet 
temperature of thought in which we always find him, 
and the attractive countenance, if you will allow me 
the expression, with which he meets one on every 
occasion." 

But will a boy of to-day, with its refinements and 
conventionalities, be the better for reading a book like 
this ? One thing he certainly will not learn from 
it — diffidence of himself — the modesty which wins in 
youth, and, once part of our being, wears so Avell in 
age. Cobbett has as little sense of it as he has of music. 
He speaks of his own " History of the Reformation" as, 
"unquestionably, the book of the greatest circulation in 



118 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

tlie whole world, the Bible only excepted," and of his 
" famous French grammar, which has been for thirty 
years, and still is, the great work of the kind through- 
out all America, and in every nation in Europe." 
Then, too, the ingenuous youth of to-day will find 
himself confronted with a set of infirmities, or even 
virtues turned into vices and crimes, enough to make 
him despair. Cobbett was in one respect of a Puritan 
nature, but, like Puritan men and women now-a-days, 
had a set of pet crimes. Torture in a Connecticut 
prison, or stoning a school teacher to death in Massa- 
chusetts, is no worse than — nay, not so bad as — in- 
heriting or owning a slave, or drinking a glass of 
wine. So with Cobbett. The fiercest passages of 
this little book are directed not only at the theatre, 
as to which there may be an intelligible difference of 
opinion, but at music, (not for a wondeF, dancing) ; 
"chess," which he classes with gambling; "a looking- 
glass" to shave or dress by; and tea and coffee, which 
he considers quite as bad as " grog." All is proscribed, 
and with equal vehemence. As his friend Paine 
irreverently said of the creation, " If the Almighty 
had been a Quaker, this would have been a drab- 
colored Avorld Avithout a green leaf or a glimpse of 
blue sky," so, if Cobbett had the absolute mastery of 
social and domestic economy, this would be a hard 
world to live in. Hence, in my poor judgment, this 
is an unprofitable book for the youth of to-day. 

The strange, hardy, perverse man wrote conscien- 
tiously, and under a high sense of responsibility. If 
there be no line which, dying, he would wish to blot, 
he thought soberly and seriously before he wrote. 



BLACKSTONE'S COMMENTARIES. 



As of theology and the Prayer Book, so of Black- 
stone and the law, I exorcise law, and think and write 
of the " Commentaries" only as literature ; and exceed- 
ingly pleasant literature they are. The poet Gray, 
in one of his letters, if my memory serves me, to 
Mason, says if " Coke-Littleton" could be printed by 
Elzevir or Aldi, on nice satin paper with gilt edges, 
and bound by the Thouvinet of his day, many a one 
would read it who now shrinks from folios and heavy 
columns. This is rather an extreme statement of the 
case, for they who have been made to pore over the 
awful "Institutes" with a suspicion, which has never 
faded away, that it was labour lost, cannot imagine it 
was, or by any conceivable masquerade could be made, 
attractive. Not so Blackstone. A dress-coat and a 
white cravat become him; he is gentlemanly and 
agreeable all over ; and my copy is, or was, bound to 
look as little like a law-book as possible, and had its 
place among the British classics; and untechnical 
students, and even women, not "strong-minded," but 
highly cultivated, intelligent, knowledge-seeking, grace- 
ful women, have read it and enjoyed it, which they 
certainly would not, had it been in "under-done, pie- 
crust binding," with a red label and star paging. 
Hence, too, is it, that in this respect one craves an 



120 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

edition without notes, or with none but such as the 
author made. All others — and the more profuse the 
annotation the worse the edition — are, as a matter of 
art, only better than the grotesque experiment made 
years ago by an American judge, of writing what he 
called a " Pennsylvania Blackstone," modifying and 
curtailing the sacred text to that end, and producing 
a book from which good taste shrinks in horror. The 
annotated editions, beginning with Christian's (I be- 
lieve the first) and ending with our American Shars- 
wood's, which by common consent is the best, are 
doubtless very good as tools of trade — the cobbler's 
awl and last, and the blacksmith's anvil — but they 
are too cumbrous and technical for the idle use of 
the gentlemanly scholar. The best edition for ama- 
teur uses is Sir John Coleridge's, published in 1825, 
and described as the sixteenth.* The notes are those 
of a refined, scholarly man, rather than a technical 
lawyer, and are characteristic of the highly-bred and 
educated Christian gentleman, whose serene old age 
now shines gently, like a setting luminary, from his 
Devonshire seclusion, and, whether editing a law-book, 
or illustrating a lovely life like Keble's, irradiates 
pleasantly. I have a memory, in student days, of 
another and American edition of the Commentaries, 
which has become obsolete, which came near my ideal, 
by Henry St. George Tucker, of Virginia, with full 
expositions of the Constitution (when Ave had one), 
and a discussion (how my young brain worried over 



* There is in the N. Y. Hist. Library the imperfect copy of au 
edition of Blackstone printed in America as early as 1771. 



BLACKSTONE'S COMMENTARIES. 121 

it) of the rule as to " mala prohibita and mala in se." 
And certainly Sir William's heresy on this head needs 
annotation. It, of course, has an earnest protest from 
an editor so pure, so direct, so conservative as Cole- 
ridge. The Blackstone theory, plainly stated, is neither 
more nor less than this, that in the matter of obedience 
or disobedience to laws creating what may be termed 
artificial offenses, such as smuggling or poaching, or, 
as with us in olden times, harbouring "a fugitive from 
labour," conscience is no further concerned than in 
submission to the penalty, whatever it may be. Surely, 
neither Paley nor his disciples, nor Dr. Wayland, 
nor any utilitarian, ever went so far. It is a solemn 
paraphrase of Fag's dictum, " I don't mind lying, sir, 
but it hurts my conscience to be found out." 'Vio- 
late the law,' says Blackstone, ' and the pang of con- 
science on detection will be assuaged by paying the 
penalty.' There can be no such rule in pure or exalted 
ethics. We have in our day known, — thanks to those 
prolific parents of all manner of lies, " tariffs," — more 
or less mild smuggling successfully accomplished, — 
silk presses, and laces, and cigars, — but Avould not a 
parent have at least a latent blush to see a daughter 
dressed in smuggled raiment, and does any sensitive 
man care to think of his own success in violating a 
law the principle of which he disapproves? There 
can be but one safe rule: that conscience binds to 
obedience to all law because it is law. This rigid 
assertion of what some may think impracticable moral- 
ity and its unworthy antagonism have had, in our 
times and at our homes, strange illustrations. With- 
out going back to the fugitive slave legislation, con- 

6 



122 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

stitutional or statutory, when a deeper question of 
conscientiousness was supposed to be involved, and 
the " irrepressible conflict" doctrine was enunciated by 
those who had very little conscience as to anything 
else, one is confronted Avith a curious historical illustra- 
tion of the Blackstonian dogma thoroughly carried out. 
When the Peace Congress (that body which but for 
prevalent madness might have saved the ineradicable 
blood-stains of four years of civil war) met at Washing- 
ton, in February, 1861, a formal proposition was made 
— by no less a person than the present Chief-Justice, 
whose good nature, when the crisis came which he 
and his followers had provoked, shrank from blood- 
shedding — that the North should continue to harbour 
fugitive slaves and pay the value of them as a penalty: 
' We cannot, in conscience, obey the law, but will pay 
cheerfully the penalty of violating it.' And this 
'compounding' of crime was to be made part of the 
Constitution which honest and religious people were 
to swear to support ! It failed at once, for the honour 
of the South rejected it. One other case, by Avay of 
conti-ast, occurs to my mind, bent, perhaps morbidly, 
on these memories, illustrative of the true and the high 
rule. How many Northern men and women were 
there, during our " troublous times," who honestly, per- 
haps mistakenly, but still most conscientiously, thought 
the war on the South was wicked and wrong in its 
inception and in its conduct? Still, for the North 
' war' was the law, and, so for as my observation went, 
no one of reputable position, however pronounced his 
opinions, ever violated or thought of violating the law, 
or doing anything in derogation of it. They felt the 



BLACKSTONE'S COMMENTARIES. 123 

ethical rule to be, — not Blackstone's, — that conscience 
bound them to obey the law as such. 

But I am wandering from my theme, though the 
theme suggests all I have written. The question is 
often asked, almost sneeringly, by carping critics like 
Priestley and Jeremy Bentham, — reverentially by the 
thousands of grateful men who owe to Blackstone their 
easy and pleasant initiation to the study of the science 
by Avhich they earn their daily bread — the question is 
asked, why is it that so old-fashioned a book as " The 
Commentaries" should last so long, and be, for the 
uses of to-day, so beautifully fresh ? There is no diffi- 
culty in answering it, after a thought or two on this 
wonderful vitality. It is exactly a hundred and twelve 
years ago, 25th October, 1758, since Blackstone, a 
young man of thirty-five, uttered the words : " Mr. 
Vice-Chancellor and Gentlemen of the University," 
with which is heralded the beautiful essay-oration on 
the " Study of the Law ;" and now, in 1870, these 
words speak sweetly and encouragingly — in spite of 
revolt and revolution, of Parliamentary reform (a ter- 
rible bugbear) and Catholic emancipation and Irish 
disestablishment (to say naught of minor social and 
political disturbances here and everywhere) — to every 
youth who, as a student, crosses the threshold of a 
lawyer's office in England, or America, or Australia, 
or wherever English law is taught. It has conquered 
prejudice, political and sectarian. Nothing has super- 
seded it. Nothing, we have a right to assume, ever 
will. Harsh critics and adversaries — and they have 
been legion — have faded out of memory. Junius 
hurled some of his most mischievous missiles, rather, 



124 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

however, at the judge than the commentator, and we 
regard them with the same sort of interest as one 
would look at an exploded shell at the foot of the 
Strasbourg minster. Of the thousands who read 
Blackstone with delight and trust, how small a frac- 
tion care a straw for Jeremy Bentham — that transitory 
idol of poor philosophy ! * Doctor Priestley wrote 
essays which, for a time and within certain circles, 
were popular, and he is as much forgotten and neg- 
lected as is the decaying Pennsylvania village where 
the exile found a home and a grave. Yet Blackstone 
lives and will live ; and that, we doubt not, which has 
embalmed him — not as were the mummies of Egypt 
or the hideous martyrs of our late war when, as with 
everything, the antiseptic process was made matter of 
jobbing, but as perfectly life-like and natural, around 
whom there is transparent crystal — is his matchless 
style, his inimitably graceful English (albeit, strange- 
ly parenthetical), his " enchanting harmony," which 
Bentham grudgingly admits and deplores. Open the 
book anywhere and you see the beauty of the style 
and hear the music of the periods ! How sweetly sound 
the closing words of his introductory essay : 

" To the few, therefore (the very few I am per- 
suaded), that entertain such unworthy notions of an 
university as to suppose it intended for mere dissipa- 
tion of thought; to such as mean only to while away 
the awkward interval from childhood to twenty-one, 
between the restraints of the school and the licentious- 



* A valued, scholarly friend here makes protest, but Blackstone is 
read and Jeremy is not ! 



f 



BLACKSTONE'S COMMENTARIES. 125 

ness of politer life, in a calm nr ddle state of mental 
and of moral inactivity ; to these, Mr. Viner gives no 
invitation to an entertainment which they never can 
relish ; but to the long and illustrious train of noble 
and ingenuous youth, who are not more distinguished 
among us by their birth and possessions than by the 
regularity of their conduct and their thirst after useful 
knowledge ; to these our benefactor has consecrated 
the fruits of a long and laborious life, worn out in the 
duties of his calling, and will joyfully reflect (if such 
reflections can be now the employment of his thoughts) 
that he could not more eifectually have benefitted pos- 
terity, or contributed to the service of the public, than 
by founding an institution which may instruct the 
rising generation in the wisdom of our civil polity, and 
inform them with a desire to be still better acquainted 
with the laws and constitution of their country." 

The critical reader of to-day may pause on the use 
here of the word "inform," but it is Miltonic. All 
else is graceful and modern, as if Avritten yesterday. 

Nor can any one measure the charm of the mode 
of instruction, originating with Viner and consum- 
mated by Blackstone, so accurately as the historical 
student Avho knows what were the actual processes of 
professional education before, when the student was 
" expected to seclude himself from the world, and, by 
a tedious, lonely process, to extract the theory of law 
from a mass of undigested learning." There lie before 
me, as I write, the manuscript note and commonplace 
books of one of these unfortunates — an American 
Templar of the ante-Blackstone period — one of the 
scholar lawyers who, from the middle and southern 



126 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

colonies, went abroad to be accomplished for the great 
struggle of " law" which soon was to occur at home. 
It must have been weary work. Woodeson had, I 
believe, been published, but it is a dismal book. Gil- 
bert was the main reliance; and Buller's Nisi Prius, 
and Coke, and Croke, and the Year Books; and 
though, I doubt not, the "illiterate" lawyer will say 
it was this very hard work, this digging painfully 
round the foundations of the law, Avhich made them 
what they were, yet, for all that, the Vinerian com- 
mentaries must have been very welcome. They took 
their appropriate place and they reign forever. 

Blackstoue, we learn, was something of a poet ; but 
I confess, if the " Farewell to the Muse" be the type of 
what we might have had, I incline to the faith that 

" nothing in his life 

Became him like the leaving ker." 

But still it may be that the subtle, fanciful element 
which we call " poetic," mingling with other faculti^es 
of art-nature which he is known to have possessed, 
influenced his oral and his written style, and gave it 
its grace and melody. His predominant taste when a 
young man, we are told, was for architecture, in which, 
practically, he was no mean adept; and when one 
contemplates this intellectual structure of his — these 
" Commentaries" — complete as a scientific and beauti- 
ful system, from the frieze to the foundation, there is 
more than a sentimental impression that his love for 
the master- art shone through his work. To his great 
book are strictly applicable the very words which, at 
its close, he applies to the British constitution. It 



BLACKSTONE'S COMMENTARIES. 127 

sounds like Giotto at the foot of the Campanile, oi* 
Michael Angelo, if it had been vouchsafed to him, 
before perfected St, Peter's: 

"Of what has been so wisely contrived, so strongly 
raised, and so highly finished, it is hard to speak with 
that praise which is justly and severely its due — the 
thorough and attentive contemplation of it will furnish 
its best panegyric. It hath been my endeavour to 
examine its solid foundations, to mark out the exten- 
sive plan, to explain the use and distribution of its 
parts, and from their harmonious concurrence to 
demonstrate the elegant proportions of the whole. We 
have taken occasion to admire at every turn the noble 
monuments of ancient simplicity and the more curious 
refinements of modern art. Nor have its faults been 
concealed from view, for faults dt has, lest we should 
be tempted to think it more than human structure, 
defects chiefly arising from the decays of time or 
the rage of unskillful improvements in later ages. To 
sustain, to repair this noble pile, is a charge intrusted 
chiefly to the nobility and such of the gentlemen of 
the kingdom as are delegated by their country to 
Parliament. The protection of the liberty of Britain 
is a duty Avhich they owe to themselves who enjoy it; 
to their ancestors, who transmitted it down ; and to 
their posterity, who wdll claim at their hands this, tlie 
best birthright and noblest inheritance of mankind." 

And is it not — for in the region of letters in which 
I am trying to move I am out of reach of the slang of 
politics and dare ask the question — is it not a great 
social inheritance, this mythical or actual thing called 
the British constitution, and do we not know that the 



128 AyfOKG MY BOOKS. 

great buttress which maintains it, is what Avriters such 
as Blackstone helped to build, — an unspotted, unsus- 
pected, dispassionate judiciary, — thoroughbred, ripened 
lawyers ? 

One other word, and I have done. It is perfectly 
marvellous how, in these four volumes of elementary 
law, comprising at most some 1800 pages, less than 
the product of one session of a State Legislature, so 
much variety of practical learning has been compressed. 
There is hardly a judicial question of contemporary 
occurrence on Avhich some light is not thrown, or some 
reference given to a source from which knoAvledge 
may be gained. Hence is it, for this universal appli- 
cability, that these Commentaries, even for practical 
purposes, are always useful. It has been his lot who 
writes these rambling notes, in which some venial 
egotism may be tolerated, to read with pleasure and 
gratitude, Blackstone at distant periods of life, and 
with widely different associations. As a lad fresh 
from college, feeling with distrust the weight of the 
armour he was doomed to wear for the struggle of life ; 
as a young man in a distant land, under the guidance 
of an eminent lawyer, Avho solaced a sort of diplomatic 
exile by revising the studies of his youth, and loved 
'Blackstone' dearly (I recollect reading the 'canons 
of descent' in sight of the snowy peaks of Mexico, 
wrapped in my great coat and warming my feet in the 
vertical sun) ; again, when myself in turn an old man, 
in regions more remote, guiding the studies of those 
who Avere dear to me ; and now, within the last few 
months or weeks, when the race of life is run and lost, 
and the work done. Always with pleasure, always 
with profit, always with gratitude! 



SERMONS— BARROW TO MANNING. 



Theke is a great deal of rubbish in what are called 
' statistics.' They are often deceptive when profitably 
applied, and are, nine times in ten, useless aggregations 
of detail ; some, of course, more than others. The 
JB>ench diplomat and savant (for he was both) who, 
on a voyage from Brest to China in a screw frigate, 
counted the revolntions of the propeller and reported 
them to his government, typified one class. Dean 
Ramsay, author of a pleasant little book called " Pulpit 
Table-talk," is the representative of another. He has an 
elaborate computation, from which he evolves the im- 
portant and frightful result, that on a single Sunday, 
in the United Kingdom, there are seventy-five thousand 
sermons preached. Add to this an equal number for the 
United States and the colonies (and this is far below the 
mark), and we reach the astounding sum, in round 
numbers, of nine millions of sermons (in avoirdupois 
some tons), written and preached in the English lan- 
guage in one year. We will not venture on any 
averages of pulpit vitality, or deductions for repetitions, 
but pause in awe of this marvellous result for one short 
span of time. If there be anything in Sir Charles 
Babbage's theory, which old Dan Chaucer prefigured, 
of tlie air undulations which make the utterances of 

6* 



130 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

the human voice immortal, these computations become 
OYerwhelming. If the clangour of the strife at Mara- 
thon, or the words of Demosthenes and JEschines, be 
yet sounding somewhere in illimitable space, enormous 
surges of clerical twaddle, masses of pulpit platitude, 
are rolling onward too. Ldbitur et labetur, etc. One- 
is hardly able to measure the value or the worthless- 
ness of it all. In the restlessness or the somnolence 
with which a dull discourse is listened to, we are apt 
unduly to disparage the vast influence Avhich this 
mode of intellectual action exercises. Watch the 
croAvds which fill the streets of a great city at Sunday 
noon, and remember that, to each individual man and 
woman of that concourse (and women listen more 
deferentially than men) solemn words, or words in 
solemn guise, have just been spoken, with more or*less 
impressiveness, and that some at least have made their 
mark. In this view, we can afford to excuse a great 
deal of nonsense and stupidity. In dissenting denomi- 
nations, the sermon is the great feature of devotion. 
In fact, their prayers have a hortatory, exegetioal 
character, which makes worship one long sermon 
with (not to speak it profanely) music between the 
acts. In the Anglican and Roman Catholic commu- 
nions, not only is there a limit of time, rendered 
necessary by the length of the supplicatory services, 
but liturgical discipline pares preaching closely, 
and puts sermonizing, where it ought to be, in the 
background. Now and then, some ambitious youth 
of oratorical pretensions and large feminine popularity 
is restive under this restraint, and hurries or curtails 
the service in order to have more room for display; 



SERMONS— BABBOW TO MANNING. 131 

but, as a general thing, the clergy acquiesce. Is it on 
this account, or are there deeper reasons, that the pulpit 
eloquence of these churches, with signal exceptions 
among dissenters, both here and abroad, is most dis- 
tinguished ? Chalmers and Kobert Hall, and, in their 
way, Irving and Whitfield and Melville, are all excep- 
tions to any general theorizing. The eloquence of the 
Anglican church, at the moment these words are writ- 
ten, never was more distinguished, at least for genial 
and gentlemanly scholarship. 

Sermons and sermon-Avriting open a wide field for 
criticism. Nothing is contemplated here but to trace 
through personal experience the line of thought, which, 
having its source in indiscriminate admiration of the 
pulpit, has narrowed down to very fastidious criticism. 
Eemember, reader, he is a layman, and, as to individ- 
uals, a rather irreverent layman, whose notes these are. 

Happy is his youth who, decorously compelled to go 
to church, — for the tendency of the normal boy is not 
in that direction, — has the good luck to go but to one. 
Mine was a difierent fate, and early digestion was 
spoiled, perhaps permanently ruined, by a variety of 
clerical viands. There was no tabernacle of wood, or 
brick, or stone, that was not visited; no hebdomadal 
spouter, from the priest and bishop of high ecclesiasti- 
cism down to the Universalist, who sold bobbins all 
the week and preached latitudinarianism on Sunday, 
whom I did not hear ; and now that memory travels 
back over a vast distance to the tangled, weedy field, 
how few things worth remembering survive! Here, 
too, my boyish memory fastens on eminent men chiefly 
in the two denominations for which, in no offence, pre- 



132 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

eminence is claimed. I recall, as of yesterday, the 
mauly, vigorous utterances of Bishop Hobart, the 
gentle eloquence of Dehon, and the wonderful music 
of Bishop Meade's voice — the last utterances of Avhich 
were in prayer for invaded, desecrated Virginia, — and 
in the Church of Rome, Bishop England, and, in his 
prime, John Hughes ; never more eloquent, and, one 
may aflfirm, never so happy or so useful as when a par- 
ish priest in Pennsylvania, and before, either of his own 
motion or at Mr. Seward's bidding, he played the poli- 
tician in New York. There was a captivating orator 
of those days, in the Celtic element at least, William 
Vincent Harrold. All dead, all gone, but none for- 
gotten ! But that it is violating a rule which, in these 
notes, I have tried to observe, one might note here — 
not as of boyish but fresh manly memory — a living 
pulpit orator, yet spared to us, John P. Durbin, then, 
if I mistake not, of Kentucky. All these are vague, 
traditional thoughts, hardly worth giving form to. 

Not so the study of written sermons. They have 
been a substantial branch of study and exercised a 
large influence on taste ; for, according to my best 
judgment, some of the sources of purest and most 
vigorous English style are very near the pulpit. It is 
the memory of a great many years back, in a busy 
lawyer's oflBce, that side by side with Plowden and 
Coke, were two other folios with the thick paper, red 
edge, black type, and heavy binding, of more than 
a century ago. These were Barrow's sermons, which 
Lord Chatham advised his son William to read as 
models of sonorous eloquence, and which Byron tells 
us he devoured weekly. 



SERMONS— BARROW TO MANNING. 133 

"Much English I cannot pretend to speak, 

Learning that language chiefly from the preachers, 

Barrow, South, Tillotson, whom every week 
I study, also Blair, the highest reachers 

Of eloquence in piety and prose." 

Of Blair, I doubt, and Tillotson I never read, but to 
tlie others I bow down reverentially as my masters. 
They are far away from me, those dear old folios ; they 
have passed out of sight, just as their owner and nearly 
all the joyous young men whose careers were then be- 
ginning, have passed out of life. 

It is a strange coincidence, such 'eloquence of 
piety' as Barrow's — for ' South' is in another cate- 
gory — with the dissolute irreligion of the Kestoration ; 
Barrow preaching, with earnestness and emphasis, 
morality of the sternest school, with the orgies of 
Whitehall within ear-shot.* Yet so it was, and he 
practiced what he taught. His was a brief but che- 
quered career, over all the variations and chances of 
which, his steady temper and sure intellectual training 
seemed to throw a graceful garment of consistency. 
He was a Charter-House boy and a Trinity College 
man, and hence his mathematical proficiency ; for, 
says his biographer, in simple, homely phrase, " dis- 
satisfied with the shallow and superficial philosophy 
which was taught, he applied himself to the study of 
the Lord Verulam, Monsieur Descartes, Galileo, and 
other great wits of the last age, who seemed to ofter 
something more solid and substantial." Why he should 
speak of them as of "the past," is not clear, since 

* " The impudent stare of a Castlemaine confronts a Barrow." — 
Willmott's Pleasures of Literature, p. 123. 



134: AMONG MT BOOKS. 

Galileo was, in old age, Barrow's contemporary, dying- 
in 1642, and Descartes in 1650, and the most remote, 
Bacon, in 1626. He weathered the fiercest blasts of 
triumphant Puritanism, and in 1654, the year after 
Cromwell dispersed his second Parliament, and the 
new crisis was at hand the issue of which no one could 
foretell, Barrow, then twenty-four years of age, went 
abroad, selling his library to jDay expenses, and rambled 
over the continent, going as far south as Siena and 
Florence, and east as Smyrna and Constantinople, and 
here, we are told, he studied anew, on the very spot 
where the golden-mouth Saint had boldly preached 
"judgment to come" in the presence of Eudoxia, 
the voluminous works of Chrysostom. It is not my 
design to write biography, yet I have drifted into it 
unconsciously, from the interest I feel in the theme, 
and close it by the recollection that the great preacher 
Avas also a great mathematician, and the immediate 
predecessor of 'Mr. Isaac Newton' in the chair of 
Geometry at Cambridge. He died in 1675. He scarcely 
preached at all till he resigned his professorship, and 
in his compacted and exhaustive logic it is not difficult 
to trace his early and his adult training. His discourses 
must have been formidable in length at the end of the 
usual morning service of the Church of England, 
measuring, so far as I can approximate it, one hour to 
an hour and a half in length. 

South was nearly contemporary with Barrow, the 
latter dying in 1675, when forty-seven years of age, 
while the former lived beyond eighty, and died in 
1716. They were widely different. A great wrong 
was done to Robert South in calling him ' the witty 



SERMONS-BARROW TO MANNING. 135 

Dr. South,' for it conveys the mistaken idea that wit 
was his most marked characteristic. Witty he cer- 
tainly was, exuberantly so. It was rough, ribald Avit, 
too. He seizes hold of a Puritan pretender and liter- 
ally tears him to pieces. He sometimes dispatches 
him with a single phrase or sentence, as ' those 
seraphic pretenders,' this ' apocalyptic ignoramus ;' 
"for," says he in his sermon at Whitehall — and one 
may fancy how Charles II. enjoyed it — *•' the proceed- 
ings of '41 and some of the following years may well 
pass for the Devil's works in a second edition, or a foul 
and odious copy much exceeding the original. I pro- 
fess not myself skilled or delighted in mystical inter- 
pretations of Scripture ; nor am I for forcing or even 
drawing the sense of the text so as to make it design- 
edly foretell the King's death and murder; nor to 
make England, Scotland, and Ireland (as some enthu- 
siasts have done) the adequate scene for the prophetic 
spirit to declare future events upon ; as if, forsooth, 
there could not be so much as a few houses fired, a feAV 
ships taken, or any other calamitous accident befall 
this little corner of the world, but that some apocalyptic 
ignoramus must presently find and pick it out of some 
abused or martyred prophecy of Ezekiel or the Reve- 
lations ;" or, as in another instance, too long to be 
quoted here, his marvellous description of a Puritan 
sermon, where he fairly revels in a full flood of bright 
sarcasm. But withal there is on every page something 
higher and better than wit or satire — noble, dignified 
eloquence, — and this in strange collocation with illus- 
trations almost grotesque, as where in one sentence, 
or rather on one page, he says: ^.'As snakes breed 



136 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

in dunghills, not singly but in knots, so in such base, 
noisome hearts you shall ever see pride and ingrati- 
tude indivisibly wreathed and twisted together." 
On the next we have: "Ingratitude is too base to 
return a kindness and too proud to regard it, much 
like the tops of mountains, barren indeed, but yet 
lofty; they produce nothing, they feed nobody, they 
clothe nobody, yet are high and stately, and look down 
upon all the world about them." So again, " There is 
a time to pardon and a time to punish, and the time 
of one is not the time of the other. When corn has 
once felt the sickle it has no more benefit from the 
sunshine ;" or Avheii he speaks of the politician •'•' as 
treating gratitude as a worse kind of witchcraft, which 
only serves to conjure up the pale, meagre ghosts of 
dead, forgotten kindnesses to haunt and trouble him ;" 
or, in a nobler passage, full of high poetry, descriptive 
of our Saviour being seized by the Jews : " They sent 
out an inconsiderable company with swords and staves 
to apprehend Him ; but what could this pitiful body 
of men have done to prejudice His life, who, with 
much more ease than Peter drew his sword, could 
have summoned more angels to His assistance than 
there were legions of men marching under the Eoman 
banners." 

Quotations may be multiplied to any extent, but my 
limits warn me to forbear. There are some odd things 
to be noted on these pulpit pages, as for example: 

Every student of our early history is familiar with 
the constant use made, at the beginning of the Ameri- 
can Eevolution, of the precedents of the commonwealth 
of 1641. Washington, who was a decorous churchman 



SERMONS— BARROW TO MANNINO. 137 

and a cavalier, did not relish them ; but Mr. Jefferson, 
whose religion went not much beyond convenient 
rhetoric, had no such scruples, and records Avith great 
glee what, on the enactment of the Boston Port Bill, 
the Virginia ' rebels' did in this respect. " With the 
help of Rushworth," says he, " whom we rummaged 
out for the revolutionary precedents and forms of the 
Puritans of those days, we cooked up a resolution, 
somewhat modernizing the phrases, for appointing the 
1st of June, on which the port bill was to commence, 
for a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, to implore 
Heaven to avert from us the evils of civil war, and to 
inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and 
to turn the hearts of the king and Parliament to 
moderation and justice." South seems to have fore- 
seen the use to be made of these pious precedents, for 
says he, in his ' Discourse on Extemporary Praying,' 
of which he has a liturgical horror : " Such sort of 
prayer has always been found an excellent way of gird- 
ing at the government in Scripture phrase. And we 
all know the common dialect in Avhich the great mas- 
ters of this art used to pray for the king, and which 
may justly pass for only a daintier and more refined 
mode of libelling him in the Lord. As, 'that God 
would turn his heart to justice and moderation and 
open his eyes ;' as if he were a pagan yet to be converted 
to Christianity; with many other sly, virulent, and 
malicious insinuations which we may every day hear 
of from those mints of treason and rebellion, the 
conventicles." 

With one other citation. I close this desultory 
criticism on the ancient pulpit. That strong, robust 



138 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

man, William Cobbett, who, as we have seen, had a 
gentle spirit, somewhere says: "A man, as he writes 
on a sheet of paper a word or sentence, ought to bear 
in mind that he is writing something which may, for 
good or evil, live forever." This is a momentous 
thought, and South says : " He who has published an 
ill book must know that his guilt and his life deter- 
mine not together; no, such an one, as the Apostle 
says, ' Being dead, yet speaketh ;' he sins in his very 
grave, corrupts others while he is rotting himself, 
and has a growing account in the other world after 
he has paid nature's last debt in this ; and, in a 
word, quits this life like a man carried off by the 
plague, who, though he dies himself, does execution 
upon others by a surviving infliction." There is a 
terrible truth in this. Who that has ever used an 
unlucky though clever phrase — who that has con- 
sciously or unconsciously given pain or excited resent- 
ment by a sharp sarcasm — and who of us has not — 
will fail to estimate one other quotation ? It is from 
the sermon on " The Fatal Imposture and Force of 
Words :" " There is a certain bewitchery or fascination 
in words which makes them operate with a force 
beyond which we can naturally give an account of. 
For would not a man think ill deeds and shrewd 
truths should reach further and stick deeper than ill 
words? And yet, not so. Men much more easily 
pardon ill things done than ill things said against 
them, such a peculiar rancour and venom do words 
leave behind them in men's minds, and so much more 
poisonously and venomously does the serpent bite with 
his tongue than with his teeth." 



SERMONS-BARROW TO MANNING. 139 

Travelling down the course of time, one pauses 
before two clerics, separated by three-quarters of a 
century, and still more divided as it were by fate ; one, 
restless, intriguing, and unfortunate, Atterbury; the 
other, arrogant and successful Horsely ; and both 
devout Christian men. Their style is as different 
as were the men, but the difference hardly admits of 
definition. It has always seemed to me that Atterbury, 
acute, gentlemanly, Avorldly, but at heart good, was a 
sort of Archdeacon Grantley of the times of the Stuarts. 
There is something more than poetical in his wander- 
ings as an exile for political offence over Europe, and 
the dying daughter at Toulouse, and the bringing back 
the dead man to England, and his interment (what a 
lesson to political intolerance now-a-days) in the abbey 
where George the First, against whom he plotted, had 
been crowned. Of Horsely — wonderful sermon-writer 
of a century later, also a geometrician like Barrow — 
one only thinks as the fierce adversary of our Priestley ; 
and, perhaps irreverently, in connection with old 
Thurlow's imprecatory vow on hearing him, then a 
curate, preach a good Tory sermon, that he would 
" make that fellow a bishop." And he did ! 

Of kindred nature to this didactic theology is a 
book, huge and appalling in form and perverse in 
doctrine, for it is one vast paradox from beginning to 
end, on which, in early manhood, I spent, not wasted, 
many a studious hour — 'The Divine Legation of 
Moses' — very unsound theology, I believe, but full of 
good, rugged eloquence, quite characteristic of the 
writer, and of wondrous, variegated scholarship. It 
was a perfect illustration, in theological literature, of 



140 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

'taking the bull by the horns,' an experiment for 
■which a polemic like Warburton was well suited. 
When the infidel of the day asserted, and proved the 
premise of fact, that, inasmuch as the Mosaic dispensa- 
tion did not teach accountability in another world, it 
could not be of God, timid controversialists went to 
work to try and deny the fact and twist the revelation 
of an hereafter out of all sorts of Pentateuchal texts. 
Not so bold Warburton. In legal phrase he not only 
'confessed and avoided,' but he made the concession 
of the fact the basis of his argument against the con- 
clusion. " Because," said he, " Moses does not refer to 
a future state of accountability, as all worldly sovereigns 
and statesmen did and do of necessity, it is, that Divine 
interposition in his behalf, direct theocracy, is de- 
monstrated." Whatever may be the force or the weak- 
ness of the logic, no one can fail to be amazed and 
fascinated by the illustrative argument. The chapters 
on the analogy of the Eleusinian mysteries to the 
-^neid descent to the Hades, dwells in my memory 
yet, though it is many, many years since these eyes 
rested on it.* 

* " Little as the Divine Legation of Moses is now read, few works 
have ever produced a greater sensation on first coming out than this 
did. It smote Trojan and Tyrian. It was a ' two-handed engine,' 
ready to batter down infidel and orthodox alike, if they ventured to 
oppose an obstacle to its autocratic progress. It lies neglected un- 
worthily on tlie upper shelves of our libraries, condemned in the lump 
as a splendid paradox by those who little know the happy illustra- 
tions it contains, gathered from every region under heaven — the pro- 
digious magazine of learning it unfolds — the infinite ingenuity it 
displays in assimilating more or less the most unpromising substances 
to the matter on hand — the sarcasm, the invective, the iokcs, sacred 



SERMONS— BARROW TO 3IANNING. 141 

It would be dull work for the readers of to-day 
to pursue this train of studious recollection further, 
or continuously. Nor was it continuous, for, sus- 
pending it for years, neglect created a great gap, on 
this side of which my companionship is with men 
of to-day — a strange grotesque fraternity of the pul- 
pit, Kobert Hall, and Dr. Arnold, and Kobertson (just 
dead), and last, not least. Manning. I have room 
but for notes on two, simply pausing to say it must 
have been high intellectual pleasure for manly boys to 
listen to Arnold, with his vigorous thought and prac- 
tical illustration, rejecting, as he did, the narrow theory 
that the pulpit should derive no help from without, 
and culling his illustrations from any field of study or 
active life which furnished them. It was the historian 
of Kome teaching Christian truth. It was my fortune 
to read Dean Stanley's biography, then a new book, dur- 
ing a long sailing voyage across the Atlantic, and study 
the record of his ineffectual life, through all its varying 
phases of peculiar opinion, down to the final agony 
{angina pectoris) which fatally crushed his noble heart ; 
and my fortune later, almost by accident, to stand 
before his grand life-like portrait in the hall at Fox- 
how. Those great eyes look upon me yet. His seems 
to have been a long struggle for nothing. His was 
a rebellious, yet, in essentials, submissive heart, and 
his life, as I have said, was inefl'ectual.* 

and profane, which are there found — ' mingle, mingle, mingle,' as 
they were poured forth from the cauldron of that most capacious and 
most turbulent mind." — Quarterhj Review, Vol. 38, p. 309. 

* My companion in the visit to Foxhow was one whose pen has 
too long been mute — the author of Philip Van Artevelde. 



142 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

But not so much so, for he taught successfully, as 
that other bright man of to-day, Eobertson. He was 
pure and noble, but distressingly crotchety. The 
hundreds and thousands who, in this country, have 
read his life and sermons, hardly know what to make 
of them or him. Churchman he was in no essential 
sense, and surely not a technical dissenter, not Truct- 
arian, not Eitualist, not (here too, I speak technically) 
Evangelical, but a strange combination of all. He 
never was meant for a clergyman, but a soldier — a robust 
Captain Vickers — and he chafed fearfully in the clerical 
harness. There is, if memory serves me, in one of 
Miss Edgeworth's novels, a character which, though 
not altogether admirable, somehow typifies Eobertson 
— a young man who, from sordid motives, becomes a 
clergyman, and writhes with agony in his chains. 
There was nothing sordid abovit Eobertson, but there 
was almost as much misery in his false position as if 
there had been. There was a robust honesty in all he 
said — a candid and fearless expression of sympathy 
which is very winning. Hence his thorough fellow- 
feeling with the working-men around him — not ' rest- 
less politician sympathy,' bat complete accord of heart. 
It crops out everywhere. He delivers a course of ser- 
mons on St. Paul's Corinth Epistles, which, one would 
think, could have little relation to commerce and com- 
mercial habits. But the Corinthians were inveterate 
traders, and thus the preacher characterizes in words, 
every one of which is truth, the spirit of trade. It is 
all I have room or inclination to quote. "Trade," 
says he, " only requires a clear head, a knowledge of 
accounts, and a certain clever capacity. It becomes a 



SERMONS— BARROW TO MANNING. 143 

life of routine at last, which does not teach one moral 
truth, or, to any extent, enlarge the mind of man. 
The danger of a mere trading existence is that it leaves 
the soul engaged, not in producing, but in removing 
productions from one place to another; it buries the 
heart in the task of money-getting ; and, measuring 
the worthiness of manhood and of all things by what 
they severally are worth, worships mammon instead of 
God. Such were the rich merchants of Corinth!" 
Some Brighton parishioners, whose week-days were 
passed in the cold shadow of Gresham's statue, must 
have started as they heard these words. If Kobertson 
was eccentric in his failures, there is a living man who 
has been so in success, for it is success, be the career 
what it may, to win one's way to its honours. Such is 
Henry Edward Manning, not yet sixty years of age; 
a poor vicar once in Sussex, then an archdeacon, a 
'pervert,' a secular priest doing humble missionary 
work in the purlieus of London, a preacher (for such 
he Avas in 1859) in the streets of Rome, and now a 
titular archbishop, with a cardinal's hat in prospect. 
Scoff not, Protestant reader, at these honours. Do 
not fancy, because the Holy Father has for a time 
fallen or is a prisoner, that the dignities he bestows 
are worthless. They are at least picturesque, though it 
is not of them I meant to write, but of less perilous 
and disputable things. The ' perverts' of the Anglican 
Church are dangerous adversaries in this, that their 
leaders — at least two of them — are masters of English 
style, not lumbering bullies of controversy like Hale 
and Cullen, or half-English, half- Latin composite 
writers such as Cardinal Wiseman eminently was, but 



144 AMONG MY BOOKS. 



men whose mother tongue was English and whose pens 
were trained in what I have sought to show is the great 
and sound school of Anglican theological composition. 
No one can read a page of that wonderful volume of 
venial egotism, the Apologia pro Vitd Sud, without 
being struck with this : " Equally is it manifest in 
Manning's sermons, those, I mean, preached before his 
secession. Those since, I have not seen ; nor did I 
care, though the chance was within my reach, to listen 
to his spoken words, doubtless of eloquence, in the 
Eoman piazzas, eleven years ago. There are certain 
crucial topics which test especially a preacher's powers? 
and discretion too, and in which the dexterous han- 
dling of words is needed. Any one may preach on 
' Charity' and the simple elemental virtues, or their 
correlative crimes. Nay, the common dogmas of 
theology are within easy reach. Of not such, is that 
greatest of mysteries — as mysterious in the buried 
and the budding grain as in the human grave — the 
' Eesurrection of the Body.' But let the curious reader 
get Archdeacon Manning's sermon on this theme, and 
unless his heart be callous, his brain sluggish and slow 
to move upon its hinges, and his sense of the beautiful 
in rhetorical art as inert as his or hers who prefers a 
frame meeting-house to a Cathedral, he will be stirred 
to admiration, and come closer to conviction than he 
ever dreamed it to be possible. 

It lies before me as I write, and, critically and aesthe- 
tically, it is worth study. It is relatively very brief — 
measured by the voice and ear, not more than half an 
hour. It is argumentative, and it is poetical. It 
teaches, and it convinces. But it is its marvellous 



1 



SERMONS— BARROW TO MANNING. 145 

English that the scholar wonders at. It is English 
'pure and simple.' There is no more Latinizing 
than in Cobbett or Swift, and yet there is a rhe- 
torical and rhythmical polish and grace which neither 
has. In one long sentence, or congeries of sentences, 
of one hundred and eighty-two words, there are but 
seventeen of Latin root, and but ten longer than dis- 
syllables. Take one, and but one, beautiful passage, 
and my idle rambling among sermons is ended : 

"After all our toiling and self-chastisement, there 
still remains with us a mysterious evil; and a deep 
consciousness is ever telling us that, do Avhat we may, 
we must bear the grave-clothes of the fall till the 
morning of the resurrection ; that we must suffer 
^^nder the load of an imperfect nature, until God shall 
resolve our sullied manhood into its original dust, and 
gather it up once more in a restored purity. The hope 
of the resurrection is the stay of our souls when they 
are wearied and baffled in striving against the disobe- 
dience of our passive nature. At that day we shall be 
delivered from the self which Ave abhor, and be all pure 
as the angels of God. healing and kindly death, 
which shall refine our mortal flesh to a spiritual body, 
and make our lower nature chime with the eternal will 
in faultless harmony !" 

This, in to-day's judgment, may be j^oor philosophy, 
or rank superstition ; but it is charming English. 

7 



THE NAPIERS. 



Not the Lords or the Logarithms, but the scholar- 
soldiers of England, the wonderful brotherhood who 
fought so well, and wrote as Avell as they fought ; not 
silent, placid soldiers, observant of decorum and 
reserve, like Wellington and Clyde (the latter of 
whom always seemed, next to one nearer home, the 
heau ideal of a gentle hero), but good sound lovers 
and liaters, always with a stock on hand of saints or 
demons ; fierce, ready controversialists, and yet withal 
so grandly martial that one cannot, in reading history, 
refrain from pausing to wonder at them ; — such Avere 
Charles and William Napier, the conqueror of Scinde, 
and the historian of the Peninsula. Theirs was strange, 
historic blood, at least on one side. 

If any curious student, with an eye to the beautiful, 
will visit the Art Department in the Astor Library, 
and open the third volume of the collected works of 
Sir Joshua Eeynolds — him who, of England's limners, 
is alone thought worthy of Florentine association — he 
will find the engraving of a lovely woman, in classic 
garb, sacrificing to the Graces. In ' George Selwyn's 
correspondence,' on the same shelves — a frivolous book 
of pleasant gossip — will be found the same ' thing of 
beauty' on a reduced scale, a half-length, which seems 
to me the idealization of loveliness. There is some- 
where a head of Lady Hamilton, by Romney, which 



THE NAPIER8. 147 

perhaps equals it; but all else, Gunniugs and Town- 
sends and Lepels, are feeble in comparison — dowdies of 
the past. This was Sarah Lennox, the peerless beauty 
of the Third Georgian era, at whose feet a monarch 
languished with as much ardour as his nature admitted 
— the sainted blind mother of the Napiers of our day 
and generation. She was in the rich glow of youthful 
beauty, making hay in front of Holland House, of 
which her elder sister was mistress, when George the 
Third Avas a susceptible young man of twenty-two; 
and she died, as recently as 1826, as I have said, the 
mother of heroes. She, this fascinating, erring, and 
venerated woman, had. a picturesque pedigree and a 
strange career. There was flowing in her veins heroic 
and erotic blood, in nearly equal parts the sangre azul 
(if blue it be) of Charles the Second and Henry of 
Navarre. Her great-grandmother was one of Charles's 
peculiar peeresses, Louisa de Querouaille, Duchess of 
Portsmouth ; her nephew, he who rode carelessly and 
jauntily, e7i amateur, by the side of Wellington in the 
fiercest fire of Waterloo ; and her oldest son, the muti- 
lated soldier of Coruiia — for he was shot almost to 
death — the victor of Meanee and Hyderabad, and con- 
queror of Scinde. 

It was an age of questionable innocence, that of the 
early part of ' good' King George's reign ; for though 
his ugly German Queen, with all the virtue-pride of 
grim purity, tried her best to assert strict discipline 
at court, there were frail Duchesses of Graftons and 
Ladies Di Beauclercs and Sarah Bunburys not far off. 
' Our beauty,' the Sarah Lennox of story, married a 
jolly, heartless, fox-hunting baronet — a sort, as I im- 



148 AMONG iVY BOOKS. 

agine, of equestrian Geoffrey Delmaine — a friend of 
Lord Carlisle and Doctor Warner and " Old Q,," and 
tliey went on an hymeneal frolic to Paris during the 
brief period of peace, and chronic intensity of depravity, 
between 1763 and the accession of Louis XVL " There 
lived," says Thackeray, in the Virginians, "during 
the last century, a certain French duke and marquis 
who distinguished himself in Europe, and America 
likewise, and has obliged posterity by leaving behind 
him a choice volume of memoirs, which the gentle 
reader is especially warned not to consult. Having 
performed the part of Don Juan in his own country, 
in ours, and in other parts of Europe, he has kindly 
noted down the names of many court beauties Avho fell 
victims to his fascinations; and very pleasing, no 
doubt, it must be for the grandsons and descendants 
of the fashionable persons among whom our brilliant 
nobleman moved, to find the names of their ancestresses 
adorning M. le Due's sprightly pages, and their frail- 
ties recorded by the candid writer who caused them." 
The wretched story of that Frenchman's life, to its 
ending under the guillotine, mainly told by himself, 
now lies before me. Writing in desultory form about 
books, let me say, that the genuineness of the ' Me- 
moires de Lauzun' is an unsolved problem of literature, 
a vexed question of criticism. It is so scandalous and 
defamatory that De Quincey says of i*^, " on the hypoth- 
esis most favourable to the Avriter, the basest of men, 
he is self-denounced as vile enough to have forged the 
stories he tells, and cannot complain if he should be 
roundly accused of doing that which he has taken 
pains to prove himself capable of doing." Harshly 



THE NAPIER8. 149 

skeptical as is this judgment, it is not a whit too harsh ; 
but I dissent, as a close student of the matter, from 
the skepticism. The vile book can be demonstrated 
to be genuine. High historical authority, such as 
Sir Augustus Foster, so pronounces it, and Moore's 
gossip confirms it. In his diary, that dreary record of 
tuft-hunting dinners, he says : " Sate next to Lady E. 
Stuart; she told me that the Memoirs of the Due de 
Lauzun (which, of course, she did not own to have 
read) were supposed to be genuine, but not true. Lord 
Thanet saw nothing improbable in them, but found 
them dull from their probability." 

If genuine and authentic, no one need look farther 
than this record of brazen iniquity to know how the 
beautiful Sarah Lennox fell, or wonder at the next 
phase in her life — a Parliamentary dissolution of her 
marriage with Sir Charles Bunbury in 1776. Divorces 
then, as we all know, were granted for but one cause, 
and the purity of descent of the peerage and gentry 
was guarded by the strange ethical but sound political 
rule, that only one sex could sin with impunity. Such 
was the fall, — now for the resurrection. 

Not long after the divorce (and it had been a child- 
less connection), Sarah Lennox married the Hon. 
George Napier, and from that hour to the day of her 
death, a period of half a century, her life was of inno- 
cence, and gentleness, and peace ; and there is some- 
thing touching in the affectionate pathos with Avhich, 
amid all the dangers on the battle-field, and in the 
agony of wounds believed to be mortal, these rugged 
soldiers thought and spoke of the sainted blind 
mother at home. Virtue-proud women, wheresoe'er 



150 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

you be (and nowhere are there more than among those 
who speak our mother-language), pause on such a tale 
as this, in no sense exaggerated or misstated, and judge 
gently of your erring sisters ! The long, tranquil even- 
ing of this beautiful woman's day has something in it 
strangely picturesque. 

But of the sons, a triumvirate of heroes — for one, 
George, I have omitted to mdiition — Charles, the elder, 
died in 1853, and William, the historian, wrote his 
biography. The younger brother's career has also been 
told, for they are all dead now. 

The life and diaries of Charles James Napier form, 
to my uumilitary mind, one of the most charming 
volume, or volumes, in the English language. If 
Southey's ' Nelson' be, as it should, the text-book of 
the British Navy, then ought this Napier story to be 
in every soldier's hand. It is neither a rare nor an 
expensive book, and not a very new one, and yet I 
regret to record, except in private libraries, it is not 
easily accessible. It is not in Mr. Astor's collection, 
and I am compelled to refer to it, guided only by the 
uncertain, fragmentary light which fading memory 
gives. It shines chiefly on Coruiia, Virginia, and 
India — a strange collocation, but a strictly accurate 
one, — and my hope in pointing to them (for I can do 
no more), is to win some intelligent reader to the 
pleasure I have had. Eemember, I write in no sense 
technically, for the jargon of war is hateful ; still less 
presuming to form judgment of the multitudinous 
controversies, military and political, in which the un- 
easy spirit of Napierism was chronically involved. 

There are scenes of history on which one loves to 



THE NAPIER8. 151 

dwell. Is not the great retreat from Ciiiiaxa one, with 
its glimpses of tlie distant sea and the Greek ' Tha- 
latta ?' And is there not another, the dark retreat in 
Spain of a small British army before the French host, 
in this very month of JSTovember, with shortening days 
and gloomy nights, sixty-two years ago, from Astorga, 
to Coruiia, and their sight of the sea, tenantless in that 
winter evening, and no rescuing relief or squadron at 
hand to save them ? In every step of that retreat these 
brothers were hand in hand. They were together 
when the terrible explosion took place, the sequel of 
which, history (William's) describes in one grand sen- 
tence : " Stillness, slightly interrupted by the waves of 
the shore, succeeded, and the business of war went on." 
As Charles Napier was going into battle, a wounded 
officer on a stretcher was brought out, and as they 
passed, it was said, in answer to a casual inquiry, ' It 
is Captain George Napier, mortally wounded !' There, 
Sir John Moore fell, with the ghastly wound of a can- 
non-ball grazing his breast, "breaking the ribs over 
his heart, and tearing the muscles of the breast into 
long stripes, interlaced by the recoil from the dragging 
of the shot;" and no sigh or groan from the dying 
man's lips, but only the "I^vould rather my sword 
should go out of the field with me," and the last words 
— worth thousands of 'I die content,' and 'Kiss me, 
Hardy' — in which there was a gentle expression of 
hope, almost amounting to a prayer: 'I trust the 
people of England will be satisfied; I hope my country 
Avill do me justice.' George Napier recovered from 
his wounds, and Charles, shockingly mutilated, and 
his life saved by the intercession of a little drummer- 



152 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

boy, fell a prisoner in the hands of the triumphant 
French. It was the day of harsh warfare, of the re- 
fusal of cartels, and of Verdun, and it is part of the 
romance of this strange story, minutely told in the 
diaries, — the chivalric kindness of the French to their 
prisoner, his reputed death at home, and the sorrows of 
the blind mother to whose darkened orbs the privilege 
of tears was left. To those curious in such matters — 
the literature of war — I may be allowed to refer to the 
model dispatch of General Hope, who on the death of 
Sir John Moore, was left in command, descriptive of 
what had occurred. It will be found in the Annual 
Eegister of 1809. 

The wounded soldier of Corufia saw no service until 
he was sent with the expeditionary force which landed 
at the Capes of Virginia in 1814. It Avas a very 
small affair, our war of 1812 — an unnatural sort of 
procedure from first to last, and with no other fruifc 
than the assertion of an existence on the ocean, — for 
we secured no one of the objects for which we went 
to war. Our military operations, Avhen we tried to 
be aggressive, as in Canada, were impotent; and so 
were those of Great Britain against us in the Chesa- 
peake and at New Orleans. Napier landed Avith 
Admiral Cochrane's forces, first in North Carolina 
and then on the Yorktown peninsula, and 'assisted,' 
as the phrase is, in the burning of Hampton — that 
unlucky village, which seems destined to invaders' 
flames. Here is it that a high-spirited soldier like 
Charles Napier, in his diary records that, while he 
did not at all mind killing a Frenchman, he could not 
conquer his repugnance to do the same thing to one 



THE NAPIERS. 153 

who asked for quarter in the mother tongue. " It 
seemed," says he, " like killing one of my own country- 
men." Virginia and this peninsula have seen the same 
bloody doings in our own days — Americans butchered 
by Americans. 'Big Bethel' is not far from the spot 
where Napier felt a Scruple. 

From Virginia in 1813, to India in 1843, is a wide 
interval of time and space. The young captain of the 
beginning of the century had become an old man and 
a general, and in an emergency was sent for to take 
command in Western India. He hesitated; he was 
old and infirm, and India Avas a field to which he was 
not used. He consulted the Duke of Wellington, and 
gossip says the Duke settled it by saying: "Charles, 
if you don't go, I shall." He went, and in the winter 
of 1842-3 was at his post. It was at a crisis of Eng- 
land's colonial empire. Lord Ellenborough, the Gov- 
ernor-Greneral, had just ordered a medal to be struck 
at the Calcutta mint commemorative of perfect re- 
conciliation, with the motto, ^^ Pax Asim Restituta" 
when war broke out all around him. Napier came to the 
rescue, and at the head of a small band of English and 
native troops, then faithful, took the field. Far away 
in the sterile spot the Indus skirts, is a fortress called 
Enmangur — a Gibraltar of the East. Napier advanced 
on it, telling those who came to threaten or propitiate, 
"Neither your Deserts nor your negotiations shall stop 
the British army;" and they advanced, and on the 17tli 
of February, 1843, was fought the bloody battle of 
Meanee, two thousand seven hundred English and 
native troops against twenty thousand intrenched 
Belooches and Sikhs. Scinde was subdued and sub- 



154 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

jected to British rule, and the clever tour de 7not was 
invented — for Napier never said it — "Peccavi" " I have 
Scinde." Equally apocryphal is Lord Dalhousie's 
"Vovi," "I have Oude." 

Meanee was fought, as I have said, on the 17th of 
February, 1843, and one of the heroes of that day was 
Sir John Pennefather, ten years later a hero of Inker- 
man. What is it that makes these old English sol- 
diers — Wellington at eighty. Sir De Lacy Evans at 
eighty-five, Lord Gough at ninety — so interesting ? Our 
American veterans run to seed or to senile efflorescence, 
as did General Scott. On the 17th of February, 1859, 
it was the lot of him who writes these lines to meet, 
while wandering among the fortifications and narrow 
streets of Valetta, this hero of Meanee and Likerman, 
as fresh as a young man, and Avith my hand on his 
saddle-bow to talk as if he were an old friend with the 
great lieutenant of Napier. 

Sir Charles Napier's career in the East ended by his 
own act, in fierce controversy, and he never took ser- 
vice again. He was a pall-bearer for his great com- 
mander, and soon after sank to rest.* 

* This little essay, on its first appearance, brought to me a letter 
which gratified me not a little from a lady whose name I have never 
ascertained, and from which I venture to extract these few words. 
"I have always been enthusiastic about that remarkable triad of 
bi'others, and I thank you for your sympathetic appreciation of their 
greatness, of rather a different stamp from the Brummagem metal now 
passing current with us. I pi'ay your pai'don for this seeming intru- 
sion, — it was irresistible to say to you that to a distant and always- 
to-be-unknown reader you have given hours of exceeding pleasure, — 
that one who also loves good old books welcomes eagerly your loving 
touch of these dear friends." 



THE STUART BOOKS. 



These notes, thus far, have been confined strictly, 
not only to English literature, but to it in its most 
familiar form — beaten tracks where every one has 
walked, common books which every one has read. 
There has been no attempt at novelty, and probably 
not a thought that has not occurred to every mind 
directed in the same course and having the same aims. 
Now that they are drawing to an end, I venture — 
adhering, however, to a theme not un-English— to 
annotate one, if not two, foreign books. They both, in 
different forms and languages, relate to the same sad 
story — the inglorious ending of the wayward, unhappy 
race which, for centuries, reigned in Scotland, and, for 
a hundred and eleven years, governed or misgoverned 
England. 

If poor Mary Stuart, whether of Scott or Fronde or 
Schiller, of romance or history, could, in her gayest or 
her saddest hour, have looked beyond the grave, and 
seen the destiny of her child's child and his chil- 
dren's children, she might well have envied the lot of 
her rival, who died childless. A grandson murdered 
before a hard-hearted populace — for Charles I.'s death, 
admitting all his faults, was a murder. A great-grand- 
son an exile and a pensioned wanderer, with two 
daughters — each a queen, and each childless. And 



156 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

then two generations more — one of restless and impo- 
tent intrigue, and another, and the last, of heroic ad- 
venture and chivalry in youth, and, in age, of wretched, 
sensual animal decay. A titular king married in old 
age to a beautiful and intellectual woman, and ending 
his career a bigot and a drunkard, and his brother a 
priest. And this was the bitter end. 

It is to this beautiful Avoman's strange career that 
these two books relate. They are biographical ' studies' 
of Louisa, Princess of Stolberg and Countess of Albany, 
wife and widow of Charles Edward, the last Stuart, 
and mistress of Alfieri, dying — almost in our day — in 
1824. One, and the most elaborate and with the widest 
continental reputation, is that of Alfred de Eeumont, 
for many years Prussian Minister at the court of the 
last Grand Duke of Tuscany, and of course resident 
of Florence, filled with Alfieri memories and Stuart 
traditions. The other is a sketch, in French, by Sainte- 
Kene Taillandier, originally, I believe, contributed to 
the Revue de Deux Mondes. Never were two works — 
if works they may be called — less alike. The French- 
man writes dogmatically and positively, with a certain 
pretentious air, but in a beautifully lucid style which 
is charming. The German, cautiously and critically, 
collating authorities when authority is hardly needed, 
and crowding, more Teutonico, into parentheses, huge 
masses of facts and dates and doctrines. He begins 
with a description of his heroine's tomb in Santa 
Croce, wanders off into picturesque illustrations of 
Italian life and Scottish and English traditions, and 
does not reach the birth till page 333 of tlie first vol- 
ume. His French competitor thus rather illnaturedly 



Tim STUART BOOKS. 157 

describes him: "In many parts of his book the dip- 
lomat interferes with the historian. M. de Eeumont 
understands the laws of etiquette so thoroughly, he 
has so profound a respect for Continental aristocracy, 
that he cannot pass any historical character of eminence 
by without making all sorts of reverence. He salutes 
him, he enumerates his titles, and sets forth his full 
genealogy. One of his chapters actually resembles an 
article of the Almanach de Gotha." This is all gro- 
tesquely true, and yet, De Keumont's book, now in the 
hands, for translation, of one of our fair countrywomen, 
is the standard work on a subject which is always in- 
teresting. And why interesting ? Why is it that we 
read of and care about these wretched kings and 
princesses — real or pretended — of the past ? If the 
skeptic wants an answer to this, let him remember that 
tragedy, the mistress of the willing soul, never stoops 
below the grade of princes and lovers, and be content 
with the fact. Adam Smith considered this question 
long ago in that most captivating of neglected books, 
' The Theory of Moral Sentiments,' and I assume the 
fact without discussing it. 

But is there not another reason why, around this 
king of shreds and tatters — I mean the Countess of 
Albany's first husband — literary interest should crys- 
tallize ? Has it not been touched by the hand of the 
necromancer ? Was it not his first theme ? Is not 
Waverley a classic ? Old enough to remember when 
the great unknown Avas really unknown, I look back to 
the reading of what was then ' sixty,' and is now a 
hundred and twenty-five years ' since,' as if it Avere a 
thing of yesterday. The gathering of the clans in the 



158 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

fastnesses of Glennaquoich ; the capture and rescue of 
the Southern Jacobite, and Eose Bradwardine's flitting 
plaid in the brigand's hut; the Chevaher's court at 
Edinburgh, and the stray shot from the castle rolling 
down the street ; the Baron at prayers; Preston Pans 
and dying Gardiner and Colonel Talbot ; and the 
advance to Derby and the retreat, and Galium Beg's 
split skull on the field of Falkirk, and the end ; and 
Flora's winding-sheet, and Fergus's dead march, and 
the bloody heads over the gates of Carlisle. Years ago 
I passed that odd, dismal old town, and my only asso- 
ciation with it, or thought about it, was of Fergus 
Maclvor and poor Evan Dhu, with their blanched faces 
turned toward Scotland. How thoroughly has this 
wonderful romance impregnated the popular mind ! 
I knew one of its illustrations once cleverly used in 
political discussion, at least so a sympathizing audience 
seemed to think. " Had the government," said a pub- 
lic speaker in the early heat of our civil war, " never 
gone beyond the limits of consent ; had it rejected, as 
did its founders, the heresy of force and the idea of a 
strong government, it would have been stronger in the 
true elements of republican power than it is in all the 
parade and panoply of successful war. I never hear of 
this notion of * power' and ' strength' without recall- 
ing an illustration Avhich fiction and romance afford. 
You have all read Scott's great epic of ' Waverley,' 
and remember its catastrophe, where the heroine is 
found working her brother's shroud ; and when she is 
told, by way of support and consolation, that she must 
rely upon her 'strength of mind' to bear up against 
her misery, the convulsive, agonized reply is: 'Ay! 



THE STUART BOOKS. . 159 

there it is— there is a busy devil at my heart that 
whispers, though it is madness to listen to it, that it is 
this very strength on which I prided myself that has 
murdered my brother.' Take care the strength of the 
government don't murder our liberties." This may be 
pestilent heresy, but it was not bad rhetoric. 

The traditions of this last of the Stuarts made them- 
selves part of Scott's sentimentally Jacobite nature, 
and years after his painting of the gay revels and 
bright adventures of the '4o, he went back to its hero 
and gave us the sombre picture of " Eedgauntlet," the 
best of his later novels. The mythical or actual visit 
of the Pretender to England was in 1750, and the 
scene London, too soon for the contrast the novelist 
wished to present between the young man and the old 
one, and he pushed it forward ten years, when his 
prince was much more in decay and decadence than 
he has portrayed him. It is of "Eedgauntlet" that 
Lockhart says : " The reintroduction of the adventu- 
rous hero of 1745, in the dulness and dimness of ad- 
vancing age and fortunes hopelessly blighted, and the 
presenting him with whose romantic portraiture at an 
earlier period historical truth had been so admirably 
blended, as the moving principle of events not only 
entirely but notoriously imaginary" (Lockhart possibly 
did not believe the Doctor King legend), " this was a 
rash experiment ; yet had there been no ' Waverley,' I 
am persuaded the fallen and faded Ascanius of ' Bed- 
gauntlet' Avould have been pronounced a masterpiece." 
Thackeray tried his master hand on this Stuart theme, 
but it was of the Pretender phre he wrote, and whom 
he so grandly painted in " Esmond." 



160 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

But let my notes go back to the actual romance of 
history, ' pure and simple' — the last years of Charles 
Edward, — the whole life of Louisa of Albany. The 
melodrama opens with a catastrophe^ Old Louis XIV. 
was, in vulgar phrase, a trump of a king. He had an 
eye for the picturesque of action, and never showed it 
more than when, as Mme. de Sevigne records and Miss 
Agnes Strickland and M. De Reumont repeat, he es- 
corted the first exiled Stuarts (taking the little ques- 
tionable Prince of AVales in his lap), and welcomed 
them to St. Germains, where he protected them so 
long. Sixty years after, in 1748, the grandson of these 
exiles, fresh from his Scottish heroism, was alone in 
Paris, the old French King dead, and his grandson, 
with Madame de Pompadour, reigning in his place. It 
was then, that, on one Tuesday night in December, 
twenty-five men of the Eoyal Guard, ^avec pouclre et 
plomh^ mats satis fatnbour,' were detailed for special 
duty. They watched the Opera-house, and when the 
poor Prince came out he was seized and gagged and 
bound, says the courtly annalist, Barbier, 'avec un 
cordon de sole,' and carried in a postchaise to Vin- 
cennes, and his attendants sent to the Bastille. In 
five days more he was hurried by force to the Swiss 
frontier and literally sent adrift. Thus, at the bidding 
of Sir Robert AValpole and the little soldier of Dettin- 
gen, did the grandson of Louis XIV. treat the grand- 
son of James II. Por twenty-two weary years he 
drifted about. Avignon — part of Pontifical dominion 
then — Spain, Germany, Poland, England, for a moment 
saw but did not welcome the wanderer, not always, 
though at last, a lonely one. For twelve years, he had 



THE STUART BOOKS. 161 

near him a true friend, and for seven, a little fair- 
haired daughter. At last they were taken from him, 
and he was thoroughly a lonely, listless man. If ever 
royal exile, with the Stuart weaknesses in his bones 
and blood, had an excuse for seeking forgetfulness by 
any means, Charles Edward had; and 1770, when the 
wanderings seemed to come to an end, found him fifty 
years of age and a drunkard; when, so says the French 
biographer, with odd anti-climax, " he was in the habit 
of beating his servants, his friends, the lords and nobles 
of his court, just as he beat the soldiers of General 
Cope at Preston Pans." 

Degraded indeed must have been the politics of 
Europe when such a man could be thought of as an 
agent of revolution; yet so it was, and tAvice within 
one year. In 1770, the Due de Choiseul, then on the 
edge of his fall, sent for him, at midnight, to come to 
Paris, and on his arrival found him so drunk he could 
make no use of him ; and, in 1771, what may be termed 
the Dubarri Ministry brought him thither again, gave 
him a pension of two hundred and forty thousand 
livres on one condition : " Soyez epoux et jiere^ and, in 
order to raise up a race of disquieting pretenders, so as 
to counterbalance the rapid progeny of young King 
George and faithful and prolific Queen Charlotte, the 
battered inebriate of fifty-one agreed to marry the 
young and pretty Princess of Stolberg, just nineteen 
years of age. " Egoistcs calculs de la jjolitique," solemnly 
says M. de Taillandier. At Macerata, not far from 
Ancona, the wedding took place, ' the blue-eyed blonde, 
blazing with grace and beauty,' and the prematurely 
old man, ' who knelt painfully on the velvet cushion ;' 



162 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

and Monsignore Peruzzini blessed them, and a medal 
was struck, ! vanitas vanitahim, in honour — so reads 
the inscription— of 'Charles III., King of England, 
France, and Ireland, and Louisa his Queen.' To Eome 
sped 'the happy pair;' but Rome was not what it once 
was to the Stuarts. A very liberal pontiff was in the 
Vatican, fonder of the fine arts than of dogmatic or 
any other kind of theology, and the Jesuits were on 
the unwilling wing. In 1739, a royal guard had been 
mounted on Monte Cavallo, and James III. was King, 
in form at least. In 1772, all was lost, even honour, 
and " Charles III." Avas simply Charles Stuart. It was 
dreary work for the bride. These biographers give 
minute details of that sad existence. There is some- 
thing painfully ludicrous in the picture, especially 
when the story-telling torture was added to all others. 
A witness of it writes from Rome : " One sees in the 
Palazzo Muti, where they live, four or five gentlemen 
with their wives, old and faithful friends, to whom the 
Pretender for the thousandth time tells the story of 
his Scotch adventures. The Queen is of middle 
height, blonde, with deep blue, eyes; she has a nose 
slightly retrousse, and a complexion of dazzling white 
and red, like an Englishwoman. Her expression is 
bright and captivating. Fancy such a woman, so cheer- 
ing and intelligent, shut up in the musty court of old 
Jacobites ! She laughs heartily, as if she had heard it 
for the first time, when her husband tells of his dis- 
guising himself as a woman in order to escape the 
Duke of Cumberland's soldiers. I found," the narrator 
adds, "the story pleasant enough at first, but it rather 
flagged after hearing it once or twice." The coming 



THE STUART BOOKS. 163 

jubilee of 1774 drove them away from the Eternal City, 
which, together, they never again saw, the poor old 
man returning there, fourteen years later, to die. 

Then follows, as a pendant to the Florentine sojourn, 
the story of Alfieri's love, which, in their odd way,.one 
French and the other German, these rival writers tell, 
and to Avhich no note would do justice. The Prince 
continued to get drunker and drunker, and maltreat 
his young wife, and that primmest and dullest of all 
diplomats, Sir Horace Mann (why is it that Walpole's 
pet correspondents were all so dull ?) duly reported to 
his court the progress of degradation and debauch. 
While at Florence, Charles Edward wrote one letter, 
reproduced by M. de Eeumont, which has a critical 
and an American interest. The critical value of it is 
that it illustrates the importance of printing documents 
with literal accuracy when errors and blemishes of 
spelling or grammar tell anything. Here they show, 
valeat quantum, that the Pretender really understood 
the English language, for though he misspells and uses 
awkward and obsolete phrases, he Avrites idiomatically. 
The paper is historically curious, as revealing a flash 
of hope and interest in the affairs of the 'old country' 
and of ours. On the 5tli January, 1778 — for news 
travelled slowly then — he Avrites to a friend in Eome 
of what had happened six months before : "I suppose 
you will have already heard of Ge Burgoyne's entier 
defete ; him and his hole army taken prisoners. I have 
just new got accounts from Paris by a veridick person 
that Dr. Franklin had received a courrier from La 
Rochelle with certain accovmts that General Waginston 
had attacked Gal. Hove, that was already blocked up .vb 



164 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

Philadelphia; and that, after a most bluddy battle, 
Howe and all his army remaining living were made 
prisoners to ye number of 17,000 and effective men. It 
is said the Elector of Hanover has broke ye parlement ; 
if all this bee confirmed, you may judge what a confu- 
sion it must make at London. Woud wish you gave 
me your opinion what you think ye consequences of 
all these events may produse." 

The beating and the drunkenness continued, all 
duly reported to the Elector of Hanover's Foreign 
Secretary, till at last the woman fled, and, after a brief 
effort at seclusion and decorum, and some ineffectual 
remonstrances from her respectable but very dull 
brother-in-laAV, the Cardinal Duke of York, joined her 
dramatic lover, though she didn't live with him till 
nearly four years afterward, when the public associa- 
tion began, whatever it was, which ended only with 
the lover's death. In April, 1784, 'the legitimate 
King of Great Britain,' as, in the paper, he styled him- 
self, gave a sort of sovereign consent to her living 
where she pleased and doing what she pleased. The 
wretched old man looked round for companionship and 
found it in his illegitimate daughter Miss Walkinshaw, 
now a woman of thirty years, from whom he had been 
separated for more than twenty, and who had been all 
the time at the convent at Meaux. She joined him in 
Italy, and never left him till the drama closed, four 
years later. She became the titular duchess of Albany. 
The dreary ending had some flashes of interest. Occa- 
sionally the fumes would be dissipated, and the debili- 
tated brain would resume its functions : " Mr. Greathed, 
a friend of Mr. Fox," says De Reumont, " visited him 



THE STUART BOOKS. 165 

just before his death. They were alone. The con- 
versation turned on 1745. At first, the Prince was 
reserved ; the memories of the past seemed to pain him ; 
but Mr. Greathed, with earnestness and yet with deli- 
cacy, pressing him, he seemed suddenly, as it were, to 
fling a great weight from his crushed spirit ; his eye 
brightened, his countenance, usually stolid, became 
animated. He began the narrative of his campaign 
with almost boyish energy ; he spoke of his marches, 
his victories, his flight amidst fearful dangers, the 
absolute devotion of the Scotch, and the bloody fate 
of so many of them. AVhen he came to this point in 
his narrative, though forty years of weary existence 
had intervened, the recollection of the death and suffer- 
ings of his followers became so vivid and so agonizing 
that suddenly the words faded from his lips and he 
sank with a sort of convulsion into a fainting fit." 
This is not the narrative of Frenchman or German, 
but of a cool-headed, guarded English witness. The 
end was near. On the 30th of January, 1788, he died 
in the arms of his daughter, who, in little over a year, 
followed him to the grave, and 'Henry IX. of Eng- 
land,' a childless priest, succeeded. With them ended 
every known trace, legitimate or illegitimate, of the 
Stuarts of Scotland and England. M. Taillandier has 
many pages of fine writing on the wife's desertion of 
the old man, and the remorse he supposes to be com- 
prised in the three mild Italian words in which her 
lover describes the conjugal woe : " I saw," says Alfieri 
in his ' Memoirs,' " to my great surprise, that, on the 
receipt of the news of her husband's death, she was non 
poca compunta !" 



166 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

These notes cannot be protracted through the long 
period of the joint lives of these strange beings, nor of 
that of the survivor — their ramblings and escapes — the 
presentation of the Pretender's widow at the 'Elector 
of Hanover's' Court, and the pension of £1600 she 
was willing to accept ; of Alfieri's death in 1803, and 
the succession of the young painter Xavier Fabre ; of 
the literary reign on the Lung' Arno, Avhere she was a 
sort of Italian Countess of Cork, down to her death, 
seventy-two years old, in 1824. Is not all this pleas- 
antly told by M. de Reiimont, and is this not that at 
which the French biographer so loftily sneers, though 
everybody reads such literary gossip with avidity ? 

" I don't pretend," says M. Taillandier, '' to enumerate 
all who, from 1814 to 1824, composed the court of the 
Queen of Florence. M. de Eeumont has given most of 
them. Like a true master of ceremonies, he announces 
solemnly all the illustrious personages, and, in subdued 
tones, tells their history. No detail escapes him. He 
knows the title and connections of all the English 
nobility who come to salute Madame d'Albany. He is 
acquainted with the private history of all the great 
ladies, and even of the Secretaries of Legation." He 
knows exactly the part played by every cardinal in the 
last conclave; what is the forte of every strange poet, 
or painter, or sculptor, who had arrived from Rome or 
Naples, Milan or Venice. He is never at a loss. He is 
never so happy as when describing the retinue of a 
peeress. It is the Duchess of Devonshire, or Cardinal 
Consalvi, or Lady Jersey, or the poet Rogers, or 
Byron's friend Hobhouse, or Ireland's poet Moore, or 
Lord John Russell, or the great historian of sculpture 



THE STUART BOOKS. 167 

Cicognara, or greatest of all (so M. Taillandier thinks) 
Lamartiue or Chateaubriand. It is a perfectly Homeric 
catalogue. It, nevertheless, was very good company, 
and this was a bright society which clustered round the 
restless old lady at the innocent close of her eventful 
life. 

Here end these desultory Stuart annotations, and 
yet it would be wrong to close them without an ac- 
knowledgment, due from every scholar interested in the 
theme, to one living man with whom this exploration 
of these Stuart traditions, in a truly catholic spirit, has 
always been a labour of love. I mean Earl Stanhope, 
better known in historic literature as Lord Malion. 
Citations from his works fairly bristle on M. de Reu- 
mont's scholarly pages, and it is at his instance that 
the translation of so valuable a work for the first time 
into English is now in progress on this side of the 
Atlantic. It is, in brief space and compact form, the 
story of a century, from 1730, when Charles Edward 
was born, to 1824, when his widow died. 

Has the daring speculation not entered the reader's 
mind whether, putting aside all the jargon of history, 
all the postulates of party, England might not have 
fared as well had the Stuarts never been exiled and 
the Hanoverians never come in ? Eeligious liberty and 
Protestantism were beyond the reach of kings or princes. 
The Stuarts, at least, were Englishmen, with English- 
men's instincts, and as to morals, the champions of 
Hanover have not much to boast of on that score. 
Antony Hamilton tells no worse tales than does Lord 
Hervey, and " Take care of poor Nellie" sounds moi*e 
pleasantly than Queen Caroline's dying " Cela n'' emphclie 



168 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

pas" when George II., in an agony of tears, resisted 
her request to marry again, by the bhibbering out, 
" Oh ! lion, faurai des mditresses." It has been some- 
where said that nothing so conclusively proves the 
crimes of the Stuarts as the English people being con- 
tent with the early Georges. 



k 



THE BRITISH THEATRE- 
MES. INCHBALD. 



As witli scientific theology and law, so with any 
ethical question about the drama, printed or acted, 
these notes have naught to do. There have been thea- 
tricals from the day of Sennacherib to our own, some 
twenty-five centuries, and, if the crack of doom be so 
long deferred, there will be actors and acting for as 
many more. The love of mimic representation is as 
near an instinct of our nature as may be, and, though 
there are men, and women too, who pretend they have 
no enjoyment in the theatre and really have a scruple 
about it, if, from the life of ordinary humanity, all 
dramatic memories could be obliterated, the residuum 
would be flat indeed. I have known a pure, and excel- 
lent, and religious woman, whose life was protracted 
far beyond the Scriptural limit, cheered to the end by. 
bright recollections of the stage, and now, when I see 
a gray head, an old man, sitting by his daughter or 
grand-daughter, innocently enjoying a play, my Puri- 
tanism is conscious of no shock. Every student recalls 
Sir Walter Scott's beautiful apologetic essay on the 
subject, written in the last hours of his happy life, and 
on the edge of the dismal chasm into which he was 
plunged. It is a charming paper in every sense. His 

8 



lYO AMONG MY BOOKS. 

excuse is all summed up in a few lines, and one detects 
the lurking fun, and sees a merry twinkle of the great 
blue eye as he gravely wrote : " We" (for he was writing 
as a reviewer), " we frankly confess one may be better 
employed than in witnessing the best and most moral 
play that ever was acted, but the same may be said of 
every action of our lives except devotion to God and 
benevolence to man." Aild, with this comfortable 
postulate, he ignores the existence of austere denuncia- 
tion of what was dear to his own cheerful nature, and 
revels in recollections of the past. The description of 
his first play, the great event of childhood, the rich 
reward of good behaviour, thought of for weeks, at 
least it used to be, " the unusual form of the house," 
" the mystic curtain, whose dusky undulations permit 
us, now and then, to discover the momentary glitter of 
some sandalled or some tiny slippered foot which trips 
lightly within — the slow rise of the shadowy curtain," 
and then ! hoAV many Pendennises, if the truth were 
told, have been madly in love with Mrs. Hallers, and 
no harm come of it ! The slippered foot beneath the 
curtain is delicious ; and I venture on one more quoted 
word of the old man genial : " It is now a long while 
since," says he, " yet we have not passed many hours 
of such unmixed delight ; and we still remember the 
sadness of the sinking lights when all was over, the 
dispersing of the crowd, Avith the vain longing that the 
music would again sound, the magic curtain once 
more arise, and the enchanting dream recommence, 
and the astonishment with which we looked upon the 
apathy of our elders, who, having the means, did not 
spend every evening at the theatre!" Scott was a 



THE BRITISH THEATRE— MRS. INCHBALD. 171 

grandfather when he thus wrote, and his biography 
(and where in any language is there a more lovely 
book ?) tells us that after poverty had overtaken and 
palsy stricken him, and he was lying on his dying bed, 
when some one read aloud hard lines of Orabbe on the 
infirmities and frailties of actors, he bade him shut the 
book because "it Avould give poor Terry pain," the 
sympathies of his gentle heart shining through the 
clouds which had settled on his memory, for Terry 
had long before gone beyond the reach of human 
pity. 

One other interlocutory remark, as lawyers would 
say, which this Scott reminiscence suggests. Let the 
outside world denounce and exorcise the theatre as it 
may, is it graceful for the drama to be untrue to itself? 
There are certain themes which written fiction, novels, 
and romances should never touch. There are charac- 
ters and situations which the drama ought never to 
illustrate. Of the former are the crimes of a parent 
visited on an innocent child, such as the hideous pic- 
ture of Dickens's paralytic old mother, or the worse one, 
because, as Avas everything he wrote, more true to nature, 
Thackeray's utterly scoundrelly father in ' Philip's Way 
Through the World.' It is, as he said of George the 
Third's insanity, "too terrible for tears." The curse 
of the second commandment is dreadful to think of. 
There is no use of having it, as it were, set to music 
and sounded in our ears when we want sweet, pleasura- 
ble melodies. So of subjects which, in its own interests, 
the acting drama should resent. Such are they which 
degrade the theatrical function, and, in its own house, 
hold it up to obloquy. A comedy of which the heroine's 



1Y2 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

leading impulse, charmingly portrayed, is shame because 
she had once been an actress, and is the daughter of 
an actor, and he a drunken specimen of the worst his- 
trionic class, ought (though the process has a Celtic 
flavour) to be hissed off the stage by the actors them- 
selves.* There are temptations enough to lower the 
standard. They need not be encouraged. They are 
painful accessories that should not be exaggerated. 
There is an old age for the actor, and retirement, which 
need not be disfigured by self-inflicted stigmas. The 
greatest of living players, in the quiet retreat of his 
Dorsetshire home, doing good to all around him, looks 
back, I doubt not, proudly to his professional career, 
remembering that it was the labour of his life, and a 
successful one, to purify and elevate the function to 
which taste or necessity called him. 

Mrs. Inchbald's " British Theatre," in its forty-seven 
compact duodecimos, well printed, well bound, and 
beautifully illustrated, is the dramatic treasury of our 
mother-tongue. It is the acting drama of England, 
from the inner edge of its licentiousness and indecency 
down to our day of relative literary imbecility. It is, 
fairly stated, the literature of a century, counting back- 
ward from 1811, the date of the last volume. And who 
fitter to collate and edit than this singularly clever and 
refined woman, actress, dramatist, novelist, to whom, 
by some incomprehensible neglect, so much injustice 
has been done ? Can it be because she was, in vulgar 
phrase, a 'Eomanist,' that the prejudice which mutines 
in the marrow and bones of Anglican protestantism 

* Albcrry's comedy of " The Coquettes." 



I 



THE BRITISH THEATRE— MRS. INCUR AID. 173 

has been operative against her ? There is no novel in 
the language, according to my poor taste, more fasci- 
nating than her almost forgotten ' Simple Story.' It 
and the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' twin gems of gentle 
luminousness, are the only English pictures Avhicli dare 
to illustrate kindly the sorrows of an erring woman, 
and poor Miss Milner and Olivia Primrose are as beau- 
tiful impersonations as if sin and shame had never 
touched them. *A11 of them is pure womanly.' Let 
any one contrast their story with Mr. Hawthorne's 
dreary romance, whose very title is hideous, and 
the merit will be manifest. Then, as a dramatist, 
Mrs. Inchbald had great success in her day. ' Every 
One Has His Fault' is a AVonderfuUy briglit play, 
with one character which is unique, that of the good- 
natured man, Mr. Harmony, who invents and utters all 
manner of fictions in order to make people love each 
other. Why is it that while the wretched trash of 
Holcroft and Morton and Colman (except ' The Jeal- 
ous Wife' and 'The Clandestine Marriage'), and the 
questionable morality of Centlivre, keep the stage, this 
drama of Mrs. Inchbald is banished or forgotten ? 

Looking at the title-pages of these multitudinous 
volumes, one cannot fail to be struck with the vast 
improvement in the acting drama, even since Mrs. 
Inchbald's day. Few, as few as possible, are the 
blemishes in this series. Yet there are some. There 
is the 'Beaux's Stratagem,' coarse enough in single 
scenes, and, to my judgment, very dull reading, as it 
must have been dull acting, even though Garrick played 
Scrub and Mrs. Abingdon, Mrs. Sullen ; but there is 
a triad of tragedies, whose very essence, the pivot 



lYJ: A^/0^'G MY BOOKS. 

of the plot, is ineffable indecency. The 'Fair Peni- 
tent/ classic enough to have, in Lothario, created a 
name for all time; the 'Orphan,' worse than any; 
and, rather better but still very bad, 'Venice Pre- 
served.' That part of the last which used to delight 
his most sacred Majesty George the Second is omitted, 
but still, as with Eowe's tragedy, the impulse, the 
moving cause of Jaffier's treason and Belvidera's 
woes, is an incident of gross indelicacy. Yet these, 
both in England and in this country, were, down 
to a very recent period, popular plays and performed 
before decorous audiences. These eyes have seen 
Monimia's and Calista's sorrows, and ears of to-day 
have heard the stately but very plain descrij)tions 
of their mistakes and Aveaknesses. Such plays 
would now be hooted from the stage, and yet the 
Colliers of to-day tell us the drama has not im- 
proved! Forty years ago these loathsome things 
were habitually represented, the expiation being that, 
on Christmas eve, George Barnwell and Milwood were 
regularly conjured up, to deter apprentices from mur- 
dering their uncles, or having to do with naughty 
women. 

Other recollections of past studies and enjoyments 
are awakened by these familiar books. As if to show 
that, in the midst of mimic licentiousness, a sol- 
emn, sermonizing drama could be written and per- 
formed, appeared ' The Provoked Husband.' Hannah 
More or Mrs. Chapone might have written it, and an 
audience of divines might listen to it. It was, too, 
strange to say, an effective play upon the stage, and 
Mr. Manly's platitudes and the final quarrel and re- 



THE BRITISH THEATRE— MRS. INCUDALD. 1^5 

conciliation of the aristocratic hero and heroine were 
made impressive by good actors. It was so in America 
at what may be termed the ' recitative' age^ when, after 
a tragedy or tragi-comedy, snch as the one just referred 
to, the audience Avas recreated by Collins's ' Ode to the 
Passions,' with a feeble orchestral accompaniment. 
That, however, which killed, and forever we trust, the 
nastiness of a century and a half ago, was not the 
solemn, pretentious prudery of the 'Provoked Hus- 
band' and 'that ilk,' but the advent, springing 
lightly and gayly into the lists, armed in brightest 
proof and with the sharpest weapons, of one who con- 
quered by superior wit — him, 

" The orator — dramatist — minstrel — who ran 
Through each mode of the lyre and was master of all. 

The 'School for Scandal,' the 'Kivals,' and the 
' Critic' (too rarely played), demolished, or took cap- 
tive and locked up, never to be extricated, the Con- 
greves and Wycherleys and Vanbrughs of a century 
before. There is something absolutely weird about the 
marvellous genius of Sheridan. He did, as Lord Byron 
said, the best of everything — made the greatest speech 
ever heard in Parliament, Avrote the best comedy, the 
best English opera, the best farce, the best epilogue, 
and, bad as was his only tragedy, and it a translation, 
Eolla's talk to the Peruvians did good work in its 
day. Very drunk he often was, very unscrupulous 
generally, but surely these sins carried penalty enough 
along with them. There has always seemed to me 
something inexpressibly sad, far worse than the 
mythical seizure of the dead man by the bailiffs, in the 



176 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

record, kept by the Prince Regent himself, of his meet- 
ing 'poor old Sheridan,' as he styles him, in shabby 
raiment in the streets of Brighton, and the broken- 
hearted man turning down a by-road to avoid the 
encounter of the host of the Pavilion. But all and en- 
during honour to his literary genius ! Whose is there, 
in its way, like it? Here, in 1870, are played, and 
well played, his two great comedies, and if the inno- 
cent merriment which Sir Peter and Mrs. Malaprop 
have for a century provoked avails for mercy ; if Sir 
Lucius O'Trigger and Lady Teazle, as perfectly repre- 
sented now and here as they were by Johnston and 
Miss Parren, are intercessory spirits, then 'poor old 
Sherry' must be happy and at peace. The 'School 
for Scandal' is contemporary with our Declaration of 
Independence, and much more cheerful. 

Of the comic writers of that day, or a little later, 
putting aside Murphy and Cumberland and the feebly 
moral school, w\as one other, whom Mrs. Inchbald has 
embalmed, who has a sort of American affiliation, and 
yet, as a writer, is well-nigh forgotten. We all know 
of Burgoyne's surrender, but hardly one knows Bur- 
goyne's comedies, and yet there are few cleverer or more 
brilliant, of a second order, than 'The Heiress' and 
* Maid of the Oaks.' Eichard Pitzpatrick, the friend 
of Walpole and Lady Ossory, and John Burgoyne, wits 
and dramatists, and refined, gentle-minded men of 
letters, were thrown away in that wretched civil war, 
and forced to unnatural companionship with ' Black 
Dick' and his brother, the General, and with the 
Knyphausens and De Heisters and other ruffian Ger- 
mans. Pitzpatrick was Lady Ossory's brother-in-law, 



THE BRITISH THEATRE— MRS. INCHBALD^ 177 

and one of the Kolliad coterie. He came over here 
with Sir Henry Clinton's reinforcements in 1777, and 
was soon sickened with his military work. Portions 
of his letters to his friends at home have been preserved 
and are in print, and a sentence of sympathy in one 
of them has a place in my memory. It is from a letter 
dated at New York, June 2, 1777. "You cannot 
imagine," he writes, " anything half so beautiful as 
this country. It is impossible to conceive anything so 
delightful. Lady Holland, in spite of her politics, 
would, I am sure, feel for it, if she could see the ruin 
and desolation we have introduced into the most beauti- 
ful, and, I verily believe, happiest part of the universe." 
The only tinge of politics that one detects in the 
comic drama of the eighteenth century, was what 
Macklin gave in two plays, in which was intensified a 
transitory but bitter political sentiment. The ' Man 
of the World,' originally called ' The True-blooded 
Scotchman,' is a tremendous embodiment of acrid, 
popular feeling. It was the Irishman giving vent to 
a hatred of race, and Sir Pertinax MacSycophant is 
really a modern Overreach, with an ending almost as 
tragical. The time was well chosen. Scotchmen 
were at Derby not very long before, and Drury Lane 
had been grievously frightened. I am not sure that 
the fleshless skulls of Lovat and Kilmarnock were not, 
still, over Temple Bar, and the scandals of Lord Bute 
and the Princess Dowager were fresh. Then it was 
that Macklin struck his blow of dramatic satire, and 
it was effective. But so vigorous and almost tragic 
were his impersonations that ordinary actors were un- 
able to present them, and in the century which has 

8* 



1Y8 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

elapsed but two have mastered them — Macklin himself 
and George Frederick Cooke. There is a scene con- 
nected with this fierce comedy which is very life-like 
as well as lively. Horace Walpole in 1781 writes to 
Mason: "Boswell, that quintessence of busy-bodies, 
called on me last week. He was let in, Avliich he 
should not have been could I have foreseen it. After 
tapping many topics to which I made as dry answers 
as an unbribed oracle, he vented his errand. 'Had 
I seen Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets ?' I answered 
slightly : ' No ; not yet,' and so overlaid his Avliole 
impertinence. As soon as he had recovered himself, 
with true Caledonian insincerity, he talked of Macklin's 
new play, and pretended he liked it. I am told there 
is very little good in the play, except the likeness of 
Sir Pertinax to twenty thonsand Scotchmen." * 

But what, all this while, of Tragedy and her " sceptred 
pall ?" Truth to say, it was not very ' gorgeous.' The 
whole eighteenth century scarcely gives one. Shake- 
speare, whom the Saturday Eevieiv thinks " no great 
things after all," was a great monopoliser, and since he 
died, no tragic drama has seized and kept the stage. 
Othello and Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth, still rule the 



* As is well known, our classic records had a narrow escape from 
this temporary social or political prejudice. In Mr. Jefferson's first 
draught of the Declaration of Independence, in the recital of wrongs 
done us by the King was this : " He is at this time transporting large 
armies of Scotch and other foreign mercenaries to complete the works of 
death, desolation, and tyranny already begun," etc. At Doctor Frank- 
lin's suggestion, the italicized words were dropped. To retain them 
would have been awkward with the Presbyterian Scot, John "Wither- 
spoon, in Congress, and the Jacobite Hugh Mercer fighting our battles t 



THE BRITISH THEATRE— MRS. INCHBALD. 179 

English-speaking mind, and, from Dr. Johnson's 
' Irene' and the Eev. Edward Young's ' Kevenge,' to 
Mr. Matnrin's 'Bertram,' all is barrenness. 'Doug- 
las,' that odd creation of a Scotch parson's brain, 
which convulsed tlie Kirk, had a flashy sort of exist- 
ence, but who that remembers, in the ' Virginians,' 
good Colonel Lambert's criticism, can read a word of 
it without laughing ? Yet, like the ' Stranger,' of 
which Thackeray made so unmerciful fun, it moved hon- 
est folks to cry, and the laughing cynic tells us " there 
was a pillar in the front box, behind which mamma 
could weep in comfort," and "the big grenadier on the 
stage" did cry, and " My Name is Nerval" holds its 
own in schools, and is a better elocutionary model than 
Mr. Webster's " Sink or Swim" bombast or Barbara 
Freitchie ; and Lady Randolph's euphemism of initiate 
maternity has become classical. 'Fazio' and 'Ion' 
and the ' Apostate' in our day have had a brief, pre- 
carious hold on the acting stage, as, through Mr. 
Macready's wonderful delineation, ' Werner' had, but 
Byron's great dramatic poems (and they are great) and 
' Philip von Artevelde,' a grand poetic creation, never 
got or can get beyond the student's inner closet.* Lord 
Lytton's 'Richelieu' has a vein of comicality in it, 
and the treacle of the Lyonese lady is nauseous to the 
youngest and the tenderest damsel, Avhether admin- 

^ * A friend calls my attention to a very quotable passage in Sar- 
danapalus, where Myrrha says, 

" By teaching thee to save thyself, and not 
Thyself alone, but these vast realms, from all 
The rase of the worst war — the war of brethren." 



180 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

istered tragically by Mr. Booth, or funnily by Mr. 
Fechter. 

There is another truth which a study of these vol- 
umes and of English dramatic literature eliminates — 
its manifest inferiority to that of the Continent of 
Europe. I do not speak of Lope, or Calderon, or Mo- 
liere, or ' the great masters,' as I do not of Shakespeare 
at home, but of the current drama of the century just 
ended. The French are essentially dramatic. Their 
actors are the best in the world, because their drama 
is, as who doubts who has seen Lemaitre, and Dejazet, 
and Rose Cherie, to say nothing of that grand diabo- 
lism, Eachel? Their dramatic writers, the most modern 
ones,-are unequalled. Casimir Delavigne's 'Ecoledes 
Veillards,' and Girardin's (is it not?) 'La joie fait 
peur,' and Scribe's ' Bertrand et Eaton,' (Talleyrand 
and Lafitte, and Parisian politics realized in this tra- 
vesty of an actual Danish tragedy) are all floating in 
memory and make us feel how inferior the correspond- 
ing literature of ours is. 

This ' Bertrand et Raton' suggests an odd reminis- 
cence of its days of popularity. It had its origin and 
success in the Orleans politics of 1830, had a wonderful 
run, and was announced in London when Prince Tal- 
leyrand was ambassador. Great was the consternation. 
The Lord Chamberlain felt that the fate of the entente 
cordiale was in his hands. ' Bertrand' was so terribly 
like the Prince that no one could mistake the carica- 
ture. It was altered and mutilated and disguised till 
nothing was left but the diplomatic wig. With doubt 
and misgiving the emasculated comedy was produced, 
and to the relief of cabinets and the composure of 



THE BRITISH THEATRE— MRS. INCHBALD. 181 

nations, Prince Talleyrand took a box and laughed 
heartily at the satire. There is in connection with 
dramatic censorship in England another anecdote of 
an ancient date — when Foote, ribald in everything, 
sent one of his most pronounced farces to the Primate 
at Lambeth with a meek request that his Grace would 
make such corrections and erasures as he might think 
right. The shrewd, good-humored prelate returned 
the manuscript intact, for, said he: "If I had made a 
single alteration, the fellow would have advertised his 
farce 'As revised and corrected by the Archbishop of 
Canterbury.' " 



NOVELS— DEFOE TO THACKERAY. 



Let any inveterate novel-reader recast liis experi- 
ence, and, if it be a tolerably long one, it will have 
strange varieties ; from the time when * Humphrey 
Clinker' was surreptitiously taken from the paternal 
bookcase, and Hannah More's ' Ccelebs' as religiously 
eschewed, down to this day of ours, when Wilkie Col- 
lins keeps us awake at night, and Miss Thackeray moves 
our minor and gentler sensibilities. One of the most 
successful, and cleverest of living novelists, Mr. Trol- 
lope, contemplates, as the complement to his strictly 
professional work, a critical history of English fiction ; 
and, with some misgiving of success, we may hope his 
plan will be carried into execution ; the doubt being, 
whether an actor can best write the story of the drama, 
or a novel-writer as nicely discriminate among novels 
as the genuine, thorough -going novel-reader. And 
when I speak of one of these, a man is meant (there 
are many women) who, Avith a 'fancy all compact' and 
'faith sincere,' reads a book of fiction as if it were a 
book of truth, and believes implicitly, for the time being, 
that Lord Orville did kiss Miss Anville's hand, and 
that Edie Ochiltree and Major Pendennis are real- 
ities. 



NOVELS— DEFOE TO THACKERAY. 183 

It is not a very long record, tliis of English novels. 
Less than two centuries will cover it all, though our 
day has witnessed a wonderful growth of all sorts of 
clever fictions. Sir Walter Scott tells us somewhere, 
that in his boyhood Mrs. Aphra Behn's novels were the 
choice reading of the modestest women ; and the New 
Atlantis was once, we know, the fashion. I have, as 
matter of critical duty, tried both, and the result is 
simple, unutterable disgust. The ' Grand Cyrus' and 
(with hesitation I say • it) the ' Decameron,' have no 
charm. I date no further back than Defoe, and begin 
a pleasant experience of English fiction with one who 
stands what is, after all, the great test — knowing how 
to create a living character. Moll Flanders, and Eox- 
ana, and Captain Jack, are stupid people enough ; but 
the story of the Plague is true, and who doubts that 
Robinson Crusoe and — as Madame Talleyrand called 
him — ce pauvreVendredi, are realities ? Who ever will 
forget Robinson finding the footprint on the sand ? It 
is not a very long jump from Queen Anne to George 
IL, from Defoe to Richardson ; and Richardson is read 
yet, though his shortest novel is in five volumes and 
the longest in seven. At circulating libraries (witness 
that most complete one amongst us, the 'Eclectic,' 
administered by an accomplished and scholarly gentle- 
man) ' Pamela,' a very poor affair, is in demand yet, ' Sir 
Charles' not so much so, and ' Clarissa' more than all. 
And who that ever read ' Clarissa Harlowe,' will for- 
get it; or who, reading it, will ever wish to try it 
again? There are books in the English language — 
' Clarissa' being one, and the ' Bride of Lammermuir' 
and ' Kenilworth'— too painful to be read a second time. 



184 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

I am not quite sure that ' Jane Eyre,' with the mad 
woman in the attic, and the ' Mill on the Floss,' are 
not in the same category. (The ' Scarlet Letter' cer- 
tainly is.) As one going to the theatre, now-a-days, 
and watching the delicacy and refinement of the acting 
drama as Mr. Wallack gives it to us, wonders that 
Wycherley's or Farquhar's comedies, or the 'Fair 
Penitent' and the 'Orphan,' ever were tolerated, so, 
far greater is the marvel that a novel founded on such 
an incident as is 'Clarissa,' could ever have been 
popular. Yet it was, and, in a certain sense, it is. 
There are scenes in it which haunt us — the deaths of 
the procuress and Belton, and the duel between Love- 
lace and Colonel Morden, the men fighting in their 
shirts and hacking each other heroically. Yet Eich- 
ardson created no immortal characters. He furnished 
names — as 'Grandison' for elaborate politeness, and 
'Lovelace' (like Howe's 'Lothario') for profligacy — 
but this was all. Not so, his rival and caricaturist. 
Fielding. He made characters to live forever — Parson 
Adams, and Partridge, and Booth — that good-natured 
sinner — ^but they are in company so low, and so low 
themselves, one does not care to recognize them ; and 
he devised fictions, of complexity so wonderful and 
minute that we cannot refrain from admiration ; but 
this is all. The purest-minded man it was ever my lot 
to meet, thought 'Tom Jones' (with Molly Seagrim 
and Lady Bellaston) the most admirable work of fiction 
ever written, and Thackeray bowed down his noble 
head in homage at the feet of Fielding.* " The kind 

* Professor Henry Keed, of Philadelphia, ob. 1854. Eheu ! 



NOVELS— DEFOE TO THACKERAY. 185 

old Johnson," says he, "would not sit down with him. 
But a greater scholar than Johnson could afford to 
admire that astonishing genius of Harry Fielding; and 
we all know the lofty panegyric which Gibbon wrote of 
him, and which remains a towering monument to the 
great novelist's memory : ' Our immortal Fielding,' he 
writes, 'was of the younger branch of the Earls of 
Denbigh, who drew their origin from the Counts of 
Hapsburg. The successors of Charles V. may disdain 
their brethren of England ; but the romance of ' Tom 
Jones,' that exquisite picture of human manners, will 
outlive the palace of the Escurial, and the Imperial 
Eagle of Austria.' There can be no gainsaying," adds 
Thackeray, " the sentence of this great judge. To have 
your name mentioned by Gibbon is like having it 
written on the dome of St. Peter's. Pilgrims from all 
the world admire and behold it." * Coleridge some- 



I 



* The best comment on Gibbon's stateliness is in a poem of Lander, 
from which, as it is fugitive, I quote a few lines : 

There are who blame thee for too stately step 
And words resounding from inflated cheek. 
Words have their proper places, just like men. 
I listen to, nor venture to reprove, 
Large language swelling under gilded domes, 
Byzantine, Syrian, Persepolitan ; 
Or where the world's drunk master lay in dust. 
Fabricius heard and spake another tongue. 
And such the calm Cornelia taught her boys, 
Such Scipio, Cffisar, Tullius, marshalling, 
Cimber and wilder Scot were humanized, 
And, far as flew the Eagles, all was Rome. 

History hath beheld no pile ascend 
So lofty, large, symmetrical, as thine. 



186 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

where says: "There is a cheerful, sunshiny, breezy 
sjiirit that prevails everywhere in Fielding, strongly 
contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity 
of Richardson." 

Start not, gentle reader, when I say I like Smollett 
(not his history, Avhich Sir Pitt Crawley thinks is good 
reading, but his novels) better than Fielding, and pre- 
fer 'Eoderick Random,' which sounds like truth, to 
'Joseph Andrews,' which, beginning in coarse carica- 
ture, never gets quite over it. Matthew Bramble and 
Lismahago and Win Jenkins are immortal, and, in a 
coarse form, Commodore Trunnion and Strap. 

We pass to a new scene, and into a pure, womanly 
atmosphere, when, at memory's bidding, rise up around 
us ' Evelina' and ' Cecilia' and ' Camilla' and ' Edgar 
Mandlebert' (lovers have no such names now-a-days, 
but are 'John' and 'Stephen') and Delville and 'Old 
Briggs.' Doctor Johnson, of his pet author's works, 
thought ' Cecilia' the best ; but on such topics ' the great 
lexicographer' is no authority, and our vote is cast for 
'Evelina,' the first, the shortest, and best, and her 
minute perplexities, and Camilla's woes, with her lover 
offering up the church's prayers for the sick by her 
bedside, his voice curing her at once. Miss Burney 
yet gives the reading world of the English language a 
vast amount of innocent delight; but she made no 
living characters! Still less did she, who founded the ' 
English school of harrowing romance, Mrs. Ann Rad- I 
cliffe ; and I doubt much if anybody reads now what j 
once made childhood sleepless, or cares more for the ■ 
'Mysteries of Udolpho' or the 'Italian' than for those 
other forgotten monstrosities, ' Abellino the Bandit' or 



NOVELS— DEFOE TO THACKERAT. 187 

' Eiiialdo Rinaldini.' Thackeray, wlien in this country, 
used to say, that his choice novel-reading was thrilling 
•dime' literature, and that he liked, of all things, such 
romances as the 'Black Brig of Bermuda' or the 
' Bloody Barber of the Bowery;' and I confess it seems 
to me they compare favourably with Schedoni, or the 
gore-stained dagger in the 'Romance of the Forest.' 
Then came Miss Porter, with her school-boy delights, 
Helen Mar and Wallace and Thaddeus of Warsaw, 
which surely no grown man ever reads ; and Godwin's 
'Caleb Williams,' dark, vigorous, without a woman, 
and which no child ever relished ; and ' Zeluco,' and 
kindred to it, though of later date, ' Anastasius'— a 
triumvirate of the hardest-hearted, stoniest books that 
fiction ever framed; heroes all wicked, remorseful, and 
unrepentant. One woman of that day — indeed, there 
are two — must not be forgotten : Sophia Lee, with her 
' Canterbury Tales,' and Mrs. Inchbald's really lovely 
'Simple Story,' with its double plot, and poor Miss 
Milner and Doriforth. Than this, I reiterate, there is 
no more beautiful novel in the English language, and 
in a gentle, Avinning way, there are scenes painted in 
it which tighten the throat and moisten the eye won- 
derfully. We must pretermit the immortal 'Vicar,' 
and can only take our hat reverentially to the good 
old man, and Moses, and Olivia, in passing by. As 
I have said, the 'one sin which women never for- 
give' is gently and pitifully treated by the Roman 
Catholic lady in the 'Simple Story,' and the kind- 
hearted Irishman in the ' Vicar of Wakefield.' 

Coming down nearer to our own day, we hail the 
steady, healthful, if not very brilliant, reign of Miss 



188 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

r\ 

Edgeworth and Mrs. Austin. Of the former, give us 
the Irish novels; and let us, in the delight of the 
* Absentee' and ' Ormond' (who can forget King Corny 
dying on the field of sport ?), really clever books, pardon 
the stately dullness of * Patronage' and the grotesque 
machinery of ' Harrington' (said to have been written 
at the request of a Jewish lady of Philadelphia), where, 
however, we may incidentally say, there is a clearer 
and more life-like picture of the ' No-Popery' riots than 
Mr. Dickens painted on the highly-tinted bizarre pages 
of 'Barnaby Eudge.' It is in Mr. Hope's gloomy 
oriental romance, we read, that in some Eastern land, 
after all adult supplication had failed to arrest a raging 
pestilence, the hands of little children, raised in j)rayer, 
pacified the angry God. So, if the gratitude of the 
girls and boys who read and speak the English lan- 
guage avail aught in regulating the literary canon, 
then surely is Maria Edgeworth a saint ; for ' Lazy 
Lawrence' and 'Barring Out' and 'Simple Susan' 
(take a 'poon, pig !) and the ' Little Merchants' avail 
more for innocent pleasure and do more good to the 
young than the aggregated tracts, and dismal, technical 
fictions which have been issued from all the combined 
Sunday-school unions from the days of Richard Eaikes 
till now. 

At the end of the first decade of this century, Eng- 
lish fiction was beginning to become very feeble, when 
there came shooting, in a mysterious form, and regu- 
lar though weird-like eff'ulgence, the Great Northern 
Light, before whom, in our judgment, all antecedent 
writers of fiction pale. I once heard an eminent novel- 



NOVELS— DEFOE TO TH ACKER AT. 189 

ist of our day criticise the dialogues and conversations 
of Scott's heroes and heroines as impossible things. 
' No men and women,' said he, ' could talk so.' The 
minute criticism may be just ; but what then ? Who 
ever in prose held the human heart so captive as did 
this whole-hearted, large-brained Wizard of the North ? 
We have lived to see the day when the genus or species 
' historical novel' has run to seed, from Horace Smith's 
' Brambletye House' to Miss Louisa Miihlbach's mis- 
eries ; but yet how different and how wonderful were 
Scott's illuminations of historical truth! He took 
realities like Claverhouse and John Balfour and the 
young Pretender, and both the Argyles and Leicester, 
and brightened them up and made them shine forth 
distinctly from the dull ground of history. In no 
instance more so than Dundee, sitting 'calm as a 
summer's morning' in the parlour at Tillietudlem after 
the disaster at Loudon Hill, or dying in the arms of 
victory at Killiecranckie, where, 

' In the glory of his manhood 
Passed the spirit of the Graeme.' 

But Scott's realities were nothing to his pure fictions, 
embodying the history of times and manners. He 
created, from the mere spirit of the times, immortal 
men and women— the Baron of Bradwardine readinsr 
the service at the head of his men on the eve of Preston 
Pans, or hiding, ragged and unshaven, in the cave, 
with a pistol in one hand and Titus Livius in the 
other, and Edie Ochiltree, and Dominie Sampson, and 
Jennie and David Deans, and Dugald Dalgetty. No 



190 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

writer of prose-fiction ever made such an epic as 
' Heart of Mid Lothian.' No painter ever drew a finer 
picture than the broken-hearted Glenallan at the head 
of his tenantry, with the bugles sounding, in the 
' Antiquary ;' and all, though history, pure imagina- 
tion ! 

Sir Walter Scott died just when there was stepping 
on the stage of active life — his career to be shorter 
than Scott's — the only one who, when the final verdict 
of criticism comes to be recorded, can claim to be his 
equal. This, too, is said when, in the gush of sensibil- 
ity which sudden death is apt to let loose, the world is 
mourning over the fresh grave of one who claimed to 
be a rival. The only high writer of fiction since the 
days of Scott is he whose bust, not his bones, is in the 
Abbey ; who, seven years ago, died sleeping in his bed ; 
whose children, two motherless girls, sorrowed meekly; 
whose family treasures were not greedily divided; 
whose Avails Avere not covered Avith pictures from his 
own works, for he avus too modest for that ; who had 
been a visitor in America without either slandering or 
flattering us; who shed a tear for a desolated land 
— and left behind him, with those who kneAv him 
personally, and those Avho did not, save through his 
works, that sweet and lovely memory Avhich literally 
blossoms in the dust. There lie before me as I write, 
the words of a bright American Avoman, a helpless 
invalid, Avhich tell a tale of truth. " Often," says she, 
" Avhen I have closed one of Thackeray's books, I sit 
thinking Avith a full heart hoAV much I owe him of 
what is best in me, of the purest pleasure I have ever 
knoAvn, filled Avith thankfulness for the power Avhich 



KOVELS— DEFOE TO THACKERAY. 191 

has been given me to appreciate him in my poor way." 
This is the track which he left behind him here.* 

We liken him to Scott, aside from the mere resem- 
blance of noble natures; and some doubting critic 
may ask us, why? One wrote naught but "what, in 
one sense or another, was historical romance ; the other, 
' novels of society.' But did not Thackeray illuminate 
history ; and does not tradition tell us and his works 
reveal, that history was his chief and favourite study ; 
and did he not, when, on the Christmas-eve of 1863, 
2Mllida mors crossed his doorstep, contemplate, as his 
crowning work, a history of Queen Anne ; and is not 
'Denis Duval' an historical fragment ? f Mr. Dickens 
tried history in his ' Tale of Two Cities' and 'Barnaby 
Rudge,' with the caricatures of Sim Tappertit and Miss 
Miggs and Hugh ; but let any one turn to that won- 
derful treasury of fact, and fancy made fact, ' Henry 
Esmond,' and, in a less degree, the ' Virginians,' and 
comparison is at an end. They are wonderful histori- 

* I am permitted, here, gratefully to mention the name of Miss 
Sarah C. Robinson, of Jamaica Plains, a devout Thackerayite, 
though with a tonch of the Dickens infection. Her's are not the 
only kind words from distant pens that have cheered these poor 
essays. 

t It was designed to tonch the edge of our Revolutionary story, 
and a leading incident to have been the betrayal of a French 
gentleman by a German spy : " This Liitterloh had been a crimping 
agent for German troops during the American war, then a servant 
in London during the Gordon riots, then an agent for a spy, then a 
spy over a spy — a consummate scoundrel, and doubly odious from 
speaking English with a German accent." Thackeray died before 
' crimping agents' came into fashion again, and mercenaries, too, — to 
do bloody work in this land of ours. 



192 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

cal romances; more wonderful as treating of times 
not too long ago. * Esmond' is, in some respects, and 
certainly to the scholar's eye, the greatest of his works. 
He thought so himself. It requires the thorough 
student of history to estimate it fairly ; and hence, of 
course, it has not the wide popularity of ' Vanity Fair,' 
for everybody knows about Waterloo; or the New- 
comes, for broken banks and scheming novercm are of 
all times ; and here, in this our day of war and panic 
and European disturbance, when stock-brokers are 
failing because our Napoleon is moving, or thinks he 
is moving, to the Khine, one notes a striking, homely 
passage in 'Vanity Fair:' "Our surprised story now 
finds itself for a moment among very famous events 
and personages, and hanging on the skirts of history. 
When the eagles of Napoleon, the Corsican upstart, 
were flying from Provence, where they had perched 
after a brief sojourn in Elba, and from steeple to steeple 
until they reached the towers of Notre Dame, I wonder 
whether the Imperial birds had any eye for a little 
corner of the parish of Bloomsbury, London, which 
you would have thought so quiet, that even the whirring 
and flapping of those mighty wings would pass un- 
observed thei'e ? — Bon Dieu, I say, is it not hard that 
the fateful work of the great Imperial struggle can't 
take place without afiecting a poor little homeless girl 
of eighteen, who is occupied in billing and cooing and 
working muslin collars in Eussell Square ? You, too, 
kindly, homely flower! — is the great roaring war- 
trumpet coming to sweep you down, here, although 
cowering under the shelter of Holborn ? Yes ; Napo- 
leon is flinging his last stake, and poor little Emmy 



NOVELS— DEFOE TO TU ACRE RAT. 193 

Sedley's happiness forms, somehow, part of it. Her 
father is bankrupt." 

This was history in 1815 (now repeated in 1870), 
painted as Gerard Dow i)aints, trutli with no other 
varnish than a gentle touch gives; and if the student 
who knows 1710 only through hooks of history — Swift's 
ghastly Journal to Stella, that dreary diary of a great, 
bad, half-crazed man's revenges, or Bolingbroke's Letter 
to Wyndham — will turn to the ' History of Henry Es- 
mond, Esq., a colonel in the service of her Majesty 
Queen Anne,' he will be amazed to find how bright and 
truthful, how much like history fiction can be made. 
James the Third, brave in battle, false as were all the 
Stuarts, lazy, profligate, has had two portraits taken of 
him. One by Thackeray in this wonderful romance, and 
one by him who knew him in the flesh, who sacrificed 
all for him and received in full those wages of which the 
exiled fixmily were so prodigal, — ingratitude and neg- 
lect. "Henry of Navarre, the great-grandfather of 
the Pretender," writes Bolingbro'ke, in a fury, " thehon- 
estest gentleman, the bravest captain, and the greatest 
prince of his age." "This man," he adds, "the simplest 
man of our time, has drunk off" the wliple chalice of big- 
otry and folly. The poison met in his composition with 
all the fear, all the credulity, and all the obstinacy of tem- 
per proper to increase its virulence and strengthen its 
effect. His religion is not founded on the love of virtue 
and the detestation of vice ; on a sense of obedience 
which is due to the will of the Supreme Being, and of 
those obligations which creatures, formed to live in 
mutual dependence on one another, lie under. The 
spring of his whole conduct is fear — fear of the horns 

9 



194 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

of the devil and of the flames of hell. He has been 
taught to believe that nothing but a blind submission 
to his church can save him from these dangers. He 
has all the superstition of a Capuchin, but no tincture 
of the religion of a Prince. No Italian ever embraced 
the man he was going to stab with a greater show of 
affection and confidence than he did me." 

There is no passage like this in Thackeray, for he 
did not write didactically or rhetorically; but there 
are dramatic pictures — scenes in Esmond — which 
make history and historical characters more plain than 
St. John, with all his skill — and it was marvellous 
— knew how to paint. We have them before us — the 
same ftilse, cowering prince, when Henry Esmond res- 
cues Beatrix and burns his patent of nobility at Cas- 
tlewood: "You will please to remember, sir," (not 
'sire,' for reverence was gone and loyalty was dead), 
" that our family hath ruined itself by fidelity to 
yours; that my grandfather spent his estate and gave 
his blood and his son, to die for your service ; that 
my dear boy's grandfather died for the same cause ; 
that my poor kinswoman, my father's second wife, 
after giving away her honour to your perjured race, 
sent all her wealth to the King, and got in return 
that precious title that lies in ashes, and this ines- 
timable yard of blue ribbon. I lay this at your feet, 
and stamp upon it. I draw this sword and break it, 
and deny you; and had you completed the wrong 
you designed us, by Heaven, I would have driven it 
through your heart, and no more pardoned you than 
your father pardoned Monmouth." 

I hasten to an end with much, very much unsaid, and 



NOVELS— DEFOE TO THACKERAY. 195 

a heart full of gratitude to this marvellous writer of 
fiction. The great test of being able to create char- 
acters to live forever, Thackeray stands bravely, and 
nowhere so wonderfully as in these historical roifiances 
to which we have confined our attention. I pass by 
Becky Sharpe, and Major Pendennis, and Colonel New- 
come, grandest of men, and Ethel, loveliest of women, 
even in her infirmities, and Costigan, and Foker, to 
dwell for an instant on the most perfectly drawn 
character, with all its shading, ever idealized, Beatrix : 
" She was imperious, she was light-minded, she was 
flighty, she was false, she had no reverence for char- 
acter, and she was very beautiful." We know of no 
other experiment in imaginative writing like this. 
Heroines or leading female parts are ordinarily dis- 
missed when the bloom of youth and beauty has 
passed, or introduced as old folks. Lady Kew and 
Miss Crawley in the pages of fiction are born old. 
But in Beatrix — the beautiful and bad — Thackeray 
did what, we repeat, no one else has attempted, and 
painted her from the cradle to the grave ; and what a 
picture ! Its very contrasts are marvellous. At four 
years old "the little girl looked at Henry Esmond 
solemnly, with a pair of large eyes, with a smile shin- 
ing over a face which was as beautiful as a cherub's, 
and then came up and put out a little hand to greet 
him." At twenty, when Kneller painted her, but did 
not, as she says, do her justice, when the Great Duke 
came to the playhouse and all eyes were turned to 
her and not to him, " she was a brown beauty — that 
is, her eyes, hair, and eyebroAVS and eyelashes were 
dark — her hair curlinsr with rich undulations and 



196 AMOUG M7 BOOKS. 

waving over her shoulders ; but her complexion was 
as dazzling white as snow in sunshine; except her 
cheeks, which were a bright red, and her lips, which 
were of a deeper crimson. Her mouth and chin, they 
said, were too large and full, and so they might be for 
a goddess in marble, but not for a woman whose eyes 
were fire, whose look was love, whose voice was the 
sweetest love song, whose shape was perfect symmetry, 
health, decision, activity, whose foot, as it planted 
itself on the ground, was firm but flexible, and whose 
motion, whether rapid or slow, was always perfect 
grace — agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen — now melt- 
ing, now imperious, now sarcastic, there Avas no single 
movement of hers but was beautiful. As he thinks of 
her, he, who writes, feels young again." This is very, 
lovely, and Beatrix seems like Burke's queenly heroine 
— a bright vision lighting on an orb she scarcely 
seemed to touch — and yet she was of the earth, very 
earthy, .and no one but Thackeray would dare to 
follow out the dreary, selfish, worldly course of this 
woman for fifty years; for it is as near as may be that 
interval between the fierce, defiant farewell in Esmond 
as the still lovely Beatrix, to her reappearance as tlie 
old Baroness Bernstein, Avith her face red ivith rouge 
and redder with punch, hobbling about on her tor- 
toise-shell cane, and making modest boys and girls 
blush for her coarseness. And then, the end of three- 
score and fifteen years of folly and self-indulgence, 
' Avhat preacher need moralize that story ?' No Eng- 
lish writer ever drew such a picture. It is the 
great triumph of genius to tell a sad tale so simply 
and so well. Here it is: "Let us draAV the curtain 



NOVELS— DEFOE TO THACKERAY. 197 

ronnd this bed. I think with awe still of those rapid 
words, uttered in the shadow of the canopy, as my 
pallid wife sits by, her prayer book on her knee ; as 
the attendants move to and fro noiselessly; as the 
clock ticks without, and strikes the fleeting hours ; as 
the sun falls upon the Kneller picture of Beatrix in 
her beauty, with the blushing cheeks, the smiling 
lips, the waving auburn tresses, and the eyes which 
seemed to look toward the dim figure moving in the 
bed." 

Death-bed scenes, in fiction or reality, have no charm 
for me. Many a great man in history has been dis- 
figured by the record of his moribund agonies. When 
Mr. Webster was dying at Marshfield, the Boston doc- 
tors published the details of his homely agonies down 
to the last hiccough, and when he was dead, dissected 
him and pfinted the autopsy in the medical journals, 
as if the viscera of a Massachusetts statesman had 
more pathological interest than those of any hod- 
carrier that lifted stones to the top of Bunker Hill. 
Napoleon fared as badly ; though, there, there was a 
mystery to be solved; and the last narrator of the 
sorrows at Saint Helena, Mr. Forsyth, draws a veil 
over the dying hero's bed.* In fiction they are, as a 
general rule, quite as unpleasant. Scott, to the best 
of my recollection, has no such scenes, though all re- 
member the fisherman's funeral in the 'Antiquary,' 

* " I respect the sanctity of the sick-room, and throw a veil over 
the infirmities of poor, siiflfering humanity. Before he strikes his last 
blow, the King of Terrors tramples on our pride, and the weakness of 
our mortal nature is shown at the death-bed of the greatest as well as 
of the meanest of mankind." — Forsijtli, vol. iii. p. 287. 



198 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

and the death-struggle of Morris in ' Rob Roy.' Mr. 
Dickens dotes on death-beds, and has a dying hero 
and heroine always on hand. Smike, and little Paul, 
and Nell, and Rosa, and Mrs. Skewton ; and, if any 
one wishes to measure the skill of artists, let him study 
in contrast this last horrid picture, where every tremor 
of palsy is recorded, and the wretched old woman is 
"wrapped up in a greasy flannel gown and put to 
bed," and Beatrix Esmond's, around which the cur- 
tains are closely drawn; or poor Miss Crawley's in 
'Vanity Fair.' "Peace to thee, kind and selfish, rain 
and generous old heathen ! We shall never see thee 
more. Let us hope that a tender hand supported her 
kindly, and led her gently out of the busy struggle of 
Vanity Fair." Colonel Newcome's is too solemn to write 
about.* 

* In Arthur Helps' latest work, ' The Wsir and General Culture,' 
is this imaginary conversation : " Mr. Milverton gave us a descrip- 
tion of the photographs of the war in America, which had been 
sent to his friend Dickens, and whicli they had looked over together, 
and then : — Sir Arthur: I should like to have been with you. Dickens 
would have been sure to make such shi'ewd remarks. Milver- 
ton : He did. He pointed out how the dead men all lay upon their 
backs, and he noticed a peculiar swelling that was visible in all 
of them ! !" 



THACKERAY— AGAIN. 



On the 33d. of December, seven years ago, a good 
man (the words are weighed and measured) laid his 
head upon the pillow, and with mother and chil- 
dren at hand unconscious of the sorrow which was in 
store for them, slept his last sleep on earth. When 
the morning came and he was found dead, they wept 
for a dear parent and child taken from them, and in 
this grief there was no alloy. He was buried, not in 
England's mortuary museum, (he was not thought 
worthy of that), but in Kensal Green, alongside of 
Hood, and Leigh Hunt, and Sidney Smith, and Lock- 
hart, and Sophia Scott, and whither John Leech and 
Mark Lemon, as genial as he, have followed him ; and 
he was mourned by true friends. When his will (if he 
made one) was opened, there was no posthumous sting 
for any one ; no regret for charities which he had 
grudgingly or ungrudgingly bestowed in life, and no 
parade of sentimental antipathy to mutes or under- 
takers. 

And when the news of his death, so sudden, so 
mysterious, so impressive in its solitude, was flashed 
over the earth, who that ever knew and loved him in 
the flesh, or worshipped him in his writings, will forget 
the pang it inflicted ? There was nothing spurious or 



200 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

artificial about it, as there was nothing spurious or ar- 
tificial about him. The pervading sorrow, through 
the English-speaking world, was described at the mo- 
ment in words so wonderful that I am tempted to 
reproduce them. Read them, reader, and carry your 
mind back to the events which then were clouding and 
agitating our humanity. It was the day of undecided 
war. It was the day of madness. 

" Just now," wrote Henry Kingsley, " the mails are 
going out. A hundred splendid steamships are speed- 
ing swiftly over every sea, east, west, and north; from 
the Omphalos called London, to carry the fortnight's 
instalment of British history and British tliought into 
every land where the English language is sjDoken. But 
the saddest news they carry — sadder thaij they have 
carried for many a month — is the announcement of 
the death of William Tliackeray. It will come first to 
N^w York, where they loved him as we did. And the 
flaneurs of Broadway, and even the busy men in Wall 
Street, will stay their politics and remember him. They 
will say, 'Poor Thackeray is dead.' Though they may 
refuse to hear the truth, though they choose to insult 
us beyond endurance at stated times,' let us keep one 
thing in mind; the flags in New York were hung at 
half-mast high when Havelock died. Let us remem- 
ber that. And so the news will travel southward. 
Some lithe clear-eyed lad will sneak, run swiftly, pause 
to listen, and then hold steadily forward across the 
desolate war-wasted sj^ace between the Federal lines 
and the smouldering watch-fires of the Confederates, 
carrying the news brought by tho last mail from Eu- 
rope, and Avill come to a knot of calm, clear-eyed, lean- 



TEA CKEBA T—A GAIN. 201 

faced Confederate officers (oh ! that such men should 
be wasted in such a quarrel, for the quarrel was not 
theirs, after all) ; and one of these men will run his 
eye over the telegram and say to the others, 'Poor 
Thackeray is dead.' And the news Avill go from picket 
to picket along the limestone ridges Avhich hang above 
the once happy valleys of Virginia, and will pass south 
until Jefferson Davis — the man so like Stratford de 
Eedcliffe, the man of the penetrating eyes, and of the 
thin, close-set lips ; the man with the weight of an 
empire on his shoulders — will look up from his papers 
and say, with heartfelt sorrow, ' The author of ' The 
Virginians' is dead.' High upon the hillside at Simla 
there will stand a group of English, Scotch, and Irish 
gentlemen, looking over the great plain below, and 
remarking to one another how much the prospect had 
changed lately, and how the gray, brown jungle has 
been slowly supplanted by the brilliant emerald 
green of the cotton-plant, and by a thousand threads 
of silver water from the irrigation trenches. •They 
will be hoping that Lawrence will succeed poor Lord 
Elgin, and that he will not be sacrificed in that ac- 
cursed Calcutta ; they will be wondering how it fares 
with Crawley. Then a dawk will toil up the hillside 
with the mail ; and in a few minutes they will be say- 
ing, ' Lawrence is appointed ; Crawley is acquitted ; but 
poor Thackeray is dead!' The pilot, when he comes 
out in his leaping whale-boat and boards the mail 
steamer, as she lies to off the headlands which form 
the entrance gates to our new Southern Empire, will 
ask the news of the captain ; and he will be told ' Lord 
Elgin and Mr. Thackeray are dead !' That morning 

9* 



202 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

they will know it at Melbourne, and it will be an- 
nounced at all the theatres; the people dawdling in 
the hot streets half the night through, awaiting for 
the breaking up of the weather, will tell it to one 
another and talk of him. The sentence which we 
have repeated so often that it has lost half its meaning, 
will have meaning to them. ' William Thackeray is 
dead !' So the news will fly through the seventy mil- 
lions of souls who speak the English language. And 
he will lie cold and deaf in his grave, unconscious, after 
all his work, of his greatest triumph ; unconscious that 
the great so-called Anglo-Saxon race little knew how 
well they loved him till they lost him. ' Vanitas 
vanitahim' Let us shut up the box and the puppets, 
for the play is played out." 

This is a powerful word-painting, and the words are 
not a whit too strong. The air was freighted with 
sad news then. 1863 was a fatal year for all kinds of 
genius. It was the year when, of statesmen, Lord 
Elgin ^ied on the mountain steep of India, following 
to the grave that other victim of the East — model of 
accomplished gentlemen — Lord Elphinstone; among 
heroes, Colin Campbell, and Outram, and Stonewall 
Jackson ; and among men of letters, besides Thacke- 
ray, Corn well Lewis and Whateley. But Thackeray, 
with the one exception of the Southern chieftain, was 
nearer to us than all. He had been amongst us, had 
found and made friends, and, while here and when he 
went away, said no word or did no thing to give pain 
to any one. He carried his reserve, when there was a 
chance of wounding national susceptibilities, to an 
excess. That he saw our manifold absurdities, is just 



THACEEBAT— AGAIN. 203 

as certain as that lie measured those of his own coun- 
trymen, but you may search his books through and 
not find a word of sting. The young diplomatist in 
' Vanity Fair/ who is angered because a peer conducts 
the pretty woman to dinner, albeit a perfectly natural 
charaater (for does not Mr. Hawthorne tell us some- 
thing of the same kind of himself?), was drawn long 
before he came to America.* Even in private corre- 
spondence he indulged in playfulness at our expense 
very sparingly. His patriotism must, indeed, be of 
the most touchy texture who can be angry at what he 
wrote to a friend from Switzerland : " The European 
Continent swarms witli your people. They are not all 
as polished as Chesterfield. I wish some of them 
spoke French a little better. I saw five of them at 
supper at Basle, the other night, with their knives 
down their throats. It was awful ! My daughter saw' 
it, and I was obliged to say: 'My dear, your great, 
great, grandmother, one of the finest ladies of the old 
school I ever saw, always applied cold steel to her 
wittles,' which is all very true ; but I wish five of 'em 
at a time wouldn't." Then, too, when sorrow comes, 
who so tender and so considerate ? There are private 
letters of his, printed since his death, and which some 
privileged readers are familiar with, which amply 

* In the American reprint of the Prize Novelists, the burlesque on 
Cooper was omitted. It is the " Stars and Stripes," and thus ends : 
" Three days afterward, as the gallant frigate, the Eepudiator, was 
sailing out of Brest harbor, the gigantic form of an Indian might be 
seen standing on the binnacle in conversation with Commodore 
Bowie, the commander of the noble ship. It was Tatua, the chief of 
the Nose-rings." 



204 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

attest this. And what could be in better taste or 
feeling than his reference in the ' Eoundabout Papers' 
to one of the enormities of our civil war which hap- 
pened to touch his social sympathies ? Of that war, 
the writer of these notes happens to know, he shrank 
from speaking or writing. Scarcely a word was lettered 
or traced by him on the subject. He had been the 
honoured guest of the affluent South. He had seen 
slavery for himself, with its evils and its good — for it 
had both. He couldn't bear Mrs. Stowe and her 
school of puritanized fiction. He loved to talk of the 
jolly little negro boys, happy as the day was long (now 
voters), whom he once saw playing in the sun on the 
Alabama Eiver, and his ideal negro ripened in the 
delineation of the pet servant in 'The Virginians,' 
The only departure from this resolute silence on the 
subject of 'the war of brethren,' is in the passage I 
have referred to. Writing, in 1863, when Mr. Seward 
and his colleagues were filling the dungeons of Fort 
Warren with the purest and most accomplished gen- 
tlemen of the land, Thackeray, in the CornMll, said ; 
"I went to the play the other night, and protest I 
hardly know what was the entertainment that passed 
before my eyes. In the next stall was an American 
gentleman who knew me. And the Christmas piece 
which the actors were playing proceeded like a piece 
in a dream. To make the grand comic performance 
doubly comic, my neighbour presently informed me 
how one of the best friends I had in America — the 
most hospitable, kindly, amiable of men, from whom 
I had twice received the warmest welcome and the 
most delightful hosjiitality — was a prisoner in Fort 



TEA GKEBA Y—A GAIN. 205 

AVarren on charges by which his life might be risked. 
I think it was the most dismal Christmas piece which 
these eyes ever looked upon." So felt the distant 
Englishman who was called cynical, and we, at home, 
full of the gushing sensibilities of our American 
nature, heard these things and saw our friends drag- 
ged to prison by the hand of lawless power, and hardly 
gave it a thought, or if we did, were afraid to utter it. 
It was in the matter of feeling to this country, North 
and South, which had been kilid to him, that Thack- 
eray stands in so proud contrast with Mr. Dickens. 
And now let me make a clean breast of it. I chafe 
under the unreal enthusiasm about Dickens. In the 
name of sound literary taste, I protest against it. 
There are tAvo things which Thackeray did not do, 
and, we have a right to say, however tempted, would 
not do — slander and caricature this country, and, 
what seems to me equally enormous, read his own 
works. He delivered lectures, original essays, here, 
but they were not on Thackeray. Can any one fancy 
him reading to an audience, with dead-heads and free 
lists in profusion, the death-bed of Colonel Newcome, 
with the bell ringing, and the ejaculated ' adsum' on 
his cold lips, or Beatrix, dying, with the sunlight fall- 
ing on the golden-tressed Kneller on the wall, or that 
awful tragedy of Deuceace, in the Bois de Boulogne, 
striking his crippled wife. They may not be too ter- 
rible 'for tears, but they are too grand to be recited by 
him who imagined them. It may be very well for an 
author to read, With or without contortions, his 'Little 
Nells' and his 'Pickwicks' and his 'Bumbles,' but not 
grand themes such as those I have referred to. I see 



206 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

that Mr. Dickens's house at Gadshill was adorned 
with pictures out of his own works, — ' Peggotty' and 
' Pecksnijff' and ' Bill Sykes,' — on which he must have 
looked very much as a Broadway coiffeur does upon 
the wax heads with wigs and ringlets in his window. 
But would Milton have tolerated Martin's mezzotints 
in his study, or Shakespeare or Schiller, Eetsch, or de- 
scending, I admit very far, Thackeray, a silhouette of 
Major Pendennis, or an oil painting of Mrs. Macken- 
zie? They had nothing in common, and vain is it, 
now that they are dead, to drag them into companion- 
ship, for which in life they were unsuited. One of 
Thackeray's recent panegyrists has, in a distant way, 
made the effort, but it is not a success. The rollick- 
ing, whole-hearted Thackeray has nothing in common 
with the sharp, business-like Dickens. Thackeray 
returns the money to the poor man who loses by his 
lectures in Philadelphia, and Dickens, as Mr. Field 
tells us, drives a hard bargain when ' he shouted in 
his impressive manner' to his business man, 'we are 
not getting on, sir ; we are not getting on.' 

Nor did Dickens's death produce in this country 
the actual effect which Thackeray's did. There was a 
parade in it, — a Westminster Abbey flavour about it. 
There was a fuss about his funeral, and, as with Mr. 
Peabody and Doctor Kane, one felt glad when he was 
finally entombed. Lecturers are not quite done with 
him, but it will not be long before the critical world 
will wonder that it saw anything marvellous in the 
writings, and will detect something of the earth, very 
earthy, in the writer. I feel that this sounds terribly 
like heresy, or blasphemy, or what not, but with criti- 



THACKEBAT— AGAIN. 20T 

cal truth, as with grander scientific facts, E pur si 
muove. 

But to the books, for the temptation is irresistible, to 
one Avho knew him, to talk or write of the man. Of 
what writer is it said, that when aii admirer was asked 
which of his works he preferred, answered, ' the last?' 
This, it seems to me, is true and not true of Thackeray, 
His later novels, dating as far back as ' Lovel, the 
Widower,' are not the most agreeable, yet the fragment 
of ' Denis Duval' seems to foreshadow a work as grand 
as anything he ever wrote. I never read it but once, 
and then the sense of misery with which I closed the 
last unfinished page has kept me from ever looking at 
it again. The series of which ' Philip' is the leading 
and the final figure, founded, first, on a base seduction, 
and then on the just condemnation of a father by a 
child, are too terrible for pleasurable reading, and I 
don't care to read * Lovel' again, and 'Barry Lyndon' 
I have never read, and ' Catharine' I wish I hadn't. 
Of 'Esmond' I have elsewhere in these notes said my 
say. It is, as a genial critic has lately written, 'a 
marvel of literature.' Not to speak of its wonderful 
intricacy of plot (I know a lady who went deliberately 
to work, so involved and interested did she become, to 
draw out apedigree of the Castlewood family), but open 
it anywhere, and see the gems that shine out from its 
wondrous pages. When foolish, sentimental women 
say that Thackeray had no sense of female loveliness 
and perfection, could they have read ' Esmond' and 
remember one picture of Lady Castlewood ? " It was 
this lady's disposition to think kindnesses, and devise 
silent bounties, and to scheme benevolence for those 



208 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

about her. We men take such goodness, for the most 
part, as if it was our due ; the Marys who bring oint- 
ment to our feet get but little thanks. Some of us 
never feel this devotion at all, or are moved by it to 
gratitude or ack^iowledgment ; others only recall it 
years after, when the days are past in which those sweet 
kindnesses were spent on us, and we offer back our re- 
turn for the debt by a poor, tardy payment»of tears. 
Then forgotten tones of love come back to us, and kind 
glances shine out of the past — 0, so bright and clear! 
0, so longed after ! because they are out of reach ; as 
holiday music from withinside of a prison wall, as sun- 
shine seen through the bars, more prized because un- 
attainable, more bright because of the contrast of pres- 
ent darkness and solitude whence there is no escape ;" 
or, in that other marvellous passage which it is hard 
for a man (a woman may) to read without tears, if he 
has ever had such love, or felt such sorrow, where 
Lady Castlewood confesses her love to Esmond : " As 
he had sometimes felt, gazing up from the deck at mid- 
night" (Thackeray had made a voyage from India, and 
knew well its solemn nightly beauties, with the stars 
overhead ancl the ocean in sparkles below, and the 
balmy atmosphere around), "gazing up from the deck at 
midnight into the boundless star-lit depths overhead, 
in "a rapture of devout wonder at that endless bright- 
ness and beauty — in some such a way now, the depth 
of this pure devotion (which was for the first time 
revealed to him) quite smote upon him and filled his 
heart with thanksgiving. Gracious Grod ! who was he, 
weak and friendless creature, that such a love should 
be poured out upon him ? Not in vain — not in vain, 



. THACKERAY— AGAIN. 209 

had lie lived ; hard and thankless should he be to think 
so that has such a treasure given him. What is ambi- 
tion compared to that, but selfish vanity ? To be rich, 
to be famous ? What do these profit a year hence, 
when other names sound louder than yours, when you 
lie hidden away under ground, along with the idle 
titles engraven on your coffin ? But only true love 
lives after you — follows your memory with secret long- 
ings, or precedes you and intercedes for you. Non 
omnis mortar; if dying, I yet live in a tender heart 
or two ; nor am lost and hopeless, living, if a sainted 
departed soul still loves and prays for me." 

Who dares say that he who wrote such words as these 
— and many are the kindred jewels, of prose and jDoetry, 
too, which can be dug from this mine — was harsh or 
cynical, and did not know how to fathom a loving 
woman's heart? Ethel Newcome stands before us, 
with all her imperfections, like the statue to which her 
creator compares her, now hidden in the cellars of the 
Louvre, and rebukes the slander; Ethel Newcome, 
peerless in beauty, impetuous in temper, flirting with 
the Marquis of Farintosh, or doing, in the Brighton 
tunnel, what young ladies properly brought up are 
supposed not to do, is worth all the Clai'issas and Ceci- 
lias of the past, and a myriad of Little Nells and Kate 
Nicklebys, the dolls of Dickens. 

Thackeray was, in one sense — not a technical one — 
a religious, or rather a devout man, and I have some- 
times fancied (start not, Protestant reader!) that he 
had a sentimental leaning to the Church of Christian 
antiquity. Certain it is, he never sneered at it or dis- 
paraged it. ' After all,' said he one night to him who 



210 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

writes these notes, driving through the streets of an 
American city and passing a lloman Catholic Cathe- 
dral, 'that is the only thing that can be called a 
church.' The brief extracts I have made from 'Es- 
mond' show how dear to him was the doctrine, so alien 
to Calvinistic Protestantism, of the intercession of the 
saints, ' the departed soul still loving and praying for 
us ;' and whenever he introduces a ' Papist,' it is in no 
"disrespect. The clergyman, with downcast eyes, saying 
his offices in the railway cars while the fierce John 
Bull Protestant glares at him over his newspaper; 
Father Holt, priest and soldier, in Esmond, the hero's 
early friend; broken-hearted Lady Steyne, bursting 
into tears when Becky jilays some of Mozart's music 
familiar in her convent days, and her memory goes 
back to innocence ; and above all, that saintly ' Ko- 
mish' woman in contrast to Mrs. Hobson'slow church 
vulgarity, Mme. de Florae, lovely in her old age, pious, 
devote in every sense, and praying for the parting soul 
of her dying lover, a broken-hearted, ruined, noble, 
Christian man. 

But my limits are overstepped, and not one tithe 
which this- theme prompts is said. It would be a rich 
subject to take Thackeray's minor characters, not his 
Beckys, and Warringtons, and Esmonds, and Major 
Pendennis (marvellous creation — one sees him now 
breaking his seals at the club window), but humble 
parts in the drama of fiction, such as will occur to 
every one without enumerating them; or his evil 
characters, some very bad, like the ' Great Marquis,' 
but none purely so, except hypocrites like Dr. Firmin 
and Sir Barnes Newcome. Old Steyne's rugged sym- 



ill 



THACKERAY— AGAIN. 211 

pathy breaks forth in very unsaintly phrase in 
' Pendennis,' when he sees the Major's sorrow for his 
nephew's danger, and the " Drive like h — 11" of the 
reprobate peer is worth all the Uncle Toby profanity, 
and the recording angel to boot, which once were so 
classical. There is not even this redeeming trait in 
the scoundrel of the Newcomes, and Thackeray used 
to say (for he sometimes, though 'but rarely, talked 
of his books) that had Sir John Dean Paul and his 
confederates been convicted before he had reached 
the catastrophe of his novel, he certainly should have 
transported Sir Barnes ; ' but,' added he, ' to my British 
mind the idea of sending a baronet to penal servitude 
seemed too monstrous and unnatural!' 

Reader, these notes are nearly done, but they would 
have been ungratefully imperfect had they not bestowed 
a special thought on one so good, so genial, jilnd so 
great. 



WALTER SCOTT. 



The»e notes are -drawing to an end; but the mem- 
ories — the bound and unbound spectres of pleasant 
books read and pencil-marked, and yet not spoken of, 
are thronging around me, and it is not easy to turn 
one's back on them. And, apropos of jjencil-marking, 
let me in passing say that, like other diabolisms, it is 
not pe?' se as black as it is painted. Vulgar, splashy 
pencil-marks, of admiration and negation and interro- 
gation, such as 'Jones of the Club' makes in 'Vanity 
Fair,' -are simply detestable; quite as bad as what, ac- 
cording to De Quincey, so much shocked Wordsworth 
— cutting a new book's leaves with a butter-knife. But 
a faint pencil-note on a margin, and the correspond- 
ent page marked on the fly-leaf, hardly visible except 
for memorial uses to the writer's eye, do no harm, and 
are very precious. I have in my day studied Scott's 
proof-sheets (the originals now in this country) with 
curious interest, to see how he altered and corrected — 
and who would not love to see Byron's notes on Bar- 
row (which "he studied weekly") ? The dead some- 
times live in these innocuous pencil-marks. There are 
books, in spirit around me now, enriched with such 
notes by one "of the most graceful critics in our land — 
long since dead, — and I seem to hear his gentle voice, 
and feel again the pressure of the hand that traced 



WALTER SCOTT. 213 

the fading marks as I gaze on them. Their unex- 
pected apparition sometimes startles me. 

To annotate Scott seems to be like annotatinsr 

o 

Shakespeare, without any excuse of necessity. Is not 
Scott part of our modern nature — I mean his prose, — 
though, unlike Sliakespeare, he don't admit of isolated 
quotation ; and is he not destined to continue so in 
spite of controversy ? His volumes are part of child- 
hood's associa'tion. Every one, I imagine, remembers 
the first shape in which he saw them. A dear friend 
pointed me the other day in his study to a rusty, dis- 
colored duodecimo, one of Cadell's edition (the best), 
as the sole survivor of that winter day of fire which 
burned up the gentlemen's liouses and private libraries 
in Columbia! Memory carries me back much farther, 
and looking, as one does now-a-days, on the multitudin- 
ous copies all around — scarcely a house without them, 
^it would be curious to know the early statistics of 
these books, Avhen one firm had the monopoly and is- 
sued them at high prices, and on paper on which no vil- 
lage almanac would now condescend to appear. But 
those primitive days had their delight. To be the first at 
the circulating library ; to crowd to the counter and get 
one of the ten or a dozen copies, and devour a fresh 'Ivan- 
hoe ;' if need be, taking it stealthily to school, and being 
caught at it by a Scotch Calvinistic or Covenanting 
schoolmaster who thought ' Old Mortality' as pestilent 
a book as the ' Age of Reason.' And then it was a 
mystery as to who wrote them. The ' Great' was truly 
'unknown,' and I am very sure we reading boys did 
not care much about identification, and rather liked it 
the better for not being known. Mr. Allibone, in his 



214 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

Dictiouary of Authors (that marvellous monument of 
judicious industry), tells us that Governor Everett once 
told him that he 'knew' Scott wrote the 'Waverleys' 
as early as 1818, and I am not prepared to deny, or de- 
termined to doubt, conceding the precocious sagacity 
of that eminent representative of a guessing commu- 
nity; but Scott did not avow it till 1827 or 1828, and 
the Adolphus Essay did not appear till 1821 ; and un- 
less Mr. Everett had access to the booksellers' secrets, 
or knew the handwriting, as Mr. Bancroft says he does 
Beiiedetti's, I incline to regard the notion as an amiable 
senile delusion. We, boy-readers of half a century 
ago, cared nothing, as I have said, as to who wrote the 
novels, provided we got early copies, and went on 
voraciously reading (do boys read so now ?) — the 
' Scottish Chiefs/ and ' Thaddeus of Warsaw,' and Mrs. 
Eadcliffe, fading away in the new daylight, — and so 
onward, till the sad day when ' Peveril' and ' Saint 
Ronan's Well' told us the wand was bent, if not broken. 
There was a flash in the ' Talisman,' and then all was 
night ; and we were grown men. It has always seemed 
a curious fact in literary pathology that never, in his 
best day, did Scott write more charmingly, as if in 
bright spirits too, than in 'Woodstock,' and it, as we 
know now, was the child of his direst, sharpest, mental 
agony, in the crisis of 1826. Who that has gone 
through phases of pecuniary ruin, and felt the misery 
with which the victim looks round on the innocent 
sufferers from his own imprudence, can forget the 
passage in his diary of the 19th January, 1826 ? It 
reads thus : " To-day when I lock this volume, I go to 
Woodstock. Heiffho — Knioht came to stare at me to 



WALTER SCOTT. 215 

complete my portrait. He must have read a tragic 
page comparative {sic) to what he saw at Abbotsford. 
We dined, of course at home, and before and after 
dinner, I finished about twenty printed pages of Wood- 
stock, but to what effect, others must judge. A painful 
scene after dinner, and another after supper, endeavour- 
ing to convince these poor dear creatures that they 
must not look for miracles, but consider misfortune 
as certain and only to be lessened by patience and 
laboui*." 

Ten days before that dreary portrait was painted, 
Scott had given one to America. It is still here, and 
he, for whom it was painted, a welcome visitor at 
Abbotsford at that very crisis, survives to look at it 
with affectionate reverence. He was then a young 
traveller wandering along the Tweed, and, as I have 
said, now, after forty-five years, still lives amongst us 
— a Boston man of letters, whose record is defiiced by 
no fanaticism, and who, true to his section, when sec- 
tions first were thought of, never prostituted literature 
to sectional politics, and from whose scholarly and 
catholic pen no acrid drop ever fell to blot his page of 
letters. He never presented a flag, or made a speech, 
or wrote an ode. Prescott died, happily, before the 
day of hatred dawned, but George Ticknor, the guest 
of Scott at Abbotsford, still lives.* 

That year, 1826, ' sorrows in battalion' came to 
Abbotsford ; and here, with a tender hand, I touch 
what biography and friendly criticism pretermit, and 
which, with our American notions, still unsophisti- 

* Since this essay was written, Mr. Ticknor has died. 



216 AMONG MY BOOKS. .,— 

cated, I confess passes comprehension. There is a 
skeleton, we know, in every house, but what was it 
that took Scott from his wife's death-bed, he know- 
ing when he left her that she was about to die ? 
From a frivolous voluptuary, such as was Moore who 
would, like Miss Pratt in the Scotch novel, if need be, 
go out to dinner in a hearse, one expects nothing 
better. He always ran away to Bowood or London 
when one of his children was about to die, and left his 
' darling Bessie' to watch the fleeting breath at home. 
But, somehow, one expects better things from Scott. 
What can it mean? Read his own account of it: 
" May 11. — Charlotte unable to take leave of me, being 
in a sound sleep after a very indifferent night. Per- 
haps it is as well — it withers my heart to think of it — 
but in her present lethargic state what would my 
presence have availed, and Anne has promised close 
and constant intelligence. I must dine with John 
Ballautyne to-day €71 f can ille. I cannot help it!" On 
the 12th, 13th, and 14th, nothing, — and on the 15th: 
" Received the melancholy intelligence that all is 
over at Abbotsford." Then, he hurries home, and 
meets ' poor Anne,' who did Avatch, and is hysterical 
and sobs out 'Poor mamma — gone forever!' and he 
visits the chamber of death and writes in his diary 
those striking words, the best description of physical 
after-death I know of : "I have seen her. The figure 
I behold is, and is not, my Charlotte, my thirty years' 
companion. There is the same symmetry of form, 
though those limbs are rigid which were once so grace- 
fully elastic; but that yellow mask with pinched 
features which seems to mock life rather than to emu- 



WALTER SCOTT. 217 

late it, can it be the face that Avas once so full of lively 
expression? I dare not look on it again." There 
were skeletons in that Abbotsford household and, but 
that one might seem to emulate the gossips who 
lacerate the feelings of the living by hinting that 
they know the secrets of the dead, there would be no 
difficulty in 'guessing' what they were. 

But the 'Novels' — the staple of romantic litera- 
ture! Wherever the language is spoken, there they 
are. They go where the language is not written or 
understood. There is a scene in the 'Antiquary' which 
always moved me much, and gave that tightening of 
the throat — hardly amounting to the hysterica j^assio 
— so familiar to genuine novel readers. It is when, at 
the end, in the alarm of the French invasion and 
amid the Avild, vulgar confusion of F airport, the bugles 
of the Glenallan yeomanry are heard and the broken- 
hearted Earl, Eveline Neville's husband, — the spirit of 
an ancient race brightening on his helm, — marches in 
at the head of his men to the rescue. I can hardly 
write it, such is the force of some sort of association, 
Avithout tears. So I read it as a boy at school. So, in 
early manhood on the plains higher than that of 
Mexico, in sight of the snoAvy mountain of Toluca; 
and so I read it when manhood was more than mature, 
on Christmas eve, in the mountains of Penang on the 
edge of a jungle tenanted by tigers and with the inter- 
ocean of Malacca literally shining at my feet. Who 
shall not be grateful to him who gives so pervading, 
so enduring, and so purely innocent pleasure ? 

His novels are not perfect, according to any stand- 
ard, but that is of no moment. To Thackeray is im- 

10 



218 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

piited, by those who forget Ethel N^ewcome, the blemish 
that he cannot make a heroine. Scott failed on both 
heroines and heroes. As to the former, he always 
had a subordinate character in reserve, who throws 
the nominal heroine into eclipse. Meg Merrilies is 
the heroine of ' Guy Maunering ;' and Kebecca, of 
' Ivanhoe,' puts the Saxon maiden in the shade, as to 
the latter of whom, there is a painful veri-similitude 
in the Thackeray ' Kebecca and Rowena,' which is 
distressing. Scott meant Effie Deans, the beauty, to 
be the heroine of the 'Heart of Mid-Lothian,' but 
freckled-faced, homely Jeannie is. Rose Bradwardine 
is a sort of lieutenant to the Scottish chieftain's sister, 
and Edith Bellenden is a nonentity. Di Vernon and 
Amy Robsart are the best. Heroes — we mean those 
who love and get married, for such is the novel read- ■ 
er's hero — fare worse. Waverley and Henry Morton I 
are naught alongside of Fergus and Dundee, and 
Henry Bertram never seems to be rid of a certain 
-cabin-boy flavour or the name of 'Brown.' So it is I 
throughout. 

But how this writer of fiction has taken possession 
of and, as it were, personated history ! If memory 
does not very much mislead, sermons were preached 
and grave books written to prove (and perhaps they 
did) that Scott was wrong in his caricature, as they 
denounced it, of the Covenanters, and his enthusiasm 
for tlie Jacobites ; but it will take centuries of severe 
criticism to disabuse the minds of studious, imagina- 
tive men, and make us think the murder of Magus 
Muir a righteous sacrifice, or that Claverhouse was a 
rufiian. Scott never verified his romances by history, 



WALTER SCOTT. 219 

and I am aware, speaking from memory, of no in- 
stance of his referring to a book while he was writing. 
He would read books, all manner of odd ones, and 
finding in them something picturesque out of which 
to weave a novel, he threw them away and worked 
up history to suit himself. 

In ' maundering,' as it were, among these familiar, 
learned-by-heart books, and iising them as cheering 
agencies in hours of suffering and gloom, I cannot 
but recall what Kobertson said of them. There 
never was a sharper contrast than between odd 
Charlotte Bronte, and genial, healthful Walter Scott, 
and it is thus stated : "I have just finished ' Villette,' 
and several of Sir Walter Scott's, and am much struck 
by the marked difference between the fictions of his 
day and ours. The effect produced is very opposite. 
From Scott's you rise witli a vigourous, healthy tone 
of feeling; from the others with that sense of ex- 
haustion which comes from feelings stirred up to end 
in nothing." "I am tired," he adds, "and mentally 
and physically shattered, and I find Scott the most 
healthful restorative of anything. There was no mor- 
bid spot in that strong, manly heart and nature." 

It is not easy to determine what the judgment of 
later writers of fiction is on this, their great master. 
Yet master he was not, in the line of what may with- 
out disparagement be termed sentimental novels — 
novels of the day. He wrote none such, with the 
exception, perhaps, of ' St. Konan's Well.' All else 
were more or less antique and historical. ' The Anti- 
quary' and ' Guy Mannering' are on the edge of the 
century, but none nearer to us. With him, too, as I 



220 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

have said, historical novel-writing came to an end. 
All since have been caricatures, like Miss Miihlbach's, 
or dreary in the extreme. Thackeray rarely refers to 
Scott, and Dickens, of course, never does. But con- 
temporary 'fictionists' clustered round him. Miss 
Edgeworth and Miss Ferrier loved him dearly. It is 
of the latter, of whom I must say a word, that Lock- 
hart relates a graceful incident. When Scott's artic- 
ulation, at the close of life, became thickened by pa- 
ralysis, she would make her partial deafness an e;xcuse 
for compelling him to repeat what had eluded his 
hearers, and thus save his feelings. To Scott, Miss 
Ferrier, owes some of her reputation, for he it was who, 
in the preface to one of the series of the ' Tales of My 
Landlord,' called attention to 'Marriage;' and there 
is not in the language a more charming triad than 
' Marriage,' ' Inheritance,' and ' Destiny.' She repaid 
it, by making Uncle Adam weep over ' Guy Man- 
nering.'* 

Scott seemed to have no enemies among the gentle- 
men of his day, English or Scotch. Not even his 
extreme Toryism alienated them, for though Whig or 
Radical ruffians hissed him and pelted him at Jed- 
burgh, Whig gentlemen were his dear friends. Faed's 
well-known picture and engraving of Scott and his 
friends, hanging in view as I write these lines, is hardly 
imaginary ; for all of them, from Hogg up to Words- 
worth, listened to him devoutly as they are painted. 

* In writing on this theme, of Fiction, these were omitted, as were 
Miss Eden's lovely novelettes — the ' Semi-Attached House, and the 
' Sfmi-DetiK-hed Coiii)le.' Miss Eden is recently dead. 



WALTER SCOTT. 221 

It is a fine group, with burly Wilson leaning over the 
chair and Crabbe, the best face and figure, intently 
gazing, with Sir Adam Ferguson in the foreground. 
How few Americans, by-the-bye, remember that this 
steady soldier- friend of Scott, was the son of the fight- 
ing chaplain of Fontenoi, the secretary of the British 
Commission which came here in 1778 to conciliate, 
and if need be, bribe, the revolted colonists into sub- 
mission. All, long since, gone to rest, and the Scott 
male race extinct. 

As a general rule, and I have presumed to assert it 
more than once, it is no part of the duty of biography 
to record the progress of bodily decay, with its homely 
symptoms. Yet is there any one who wishes that Mr. 
Lockhart had foregone his wonderful and almost 
poetic account of Scott's end of life, from the first 
apoplectic attack at Abbotsford, or Castle Street, I 
forget which, down to the last breath on that autumn 
afternoon, "with the window open and the sound of 
the Tweed rippling over the stones ?" There is some- 
thing terrible in the final crash, the subsidence of 
intellect, when, descending the Khine, and leaving its 
castled crags, he passed Cologne, and sank down to 
the dead level of hopeless imbecility. The house is 
still pointed out in London where the crowd as- 
sembled at night to hear the news, and, as Allan 
Cunningham tells us, reverentially to point out the 
room where 'he' was lying, as if there was no other 
dying 'he' in London. I confess to the weakness of 
looking for the house in Malta in the Strada Pon- 
ente, and the window where Lady Davy watched him 
working, before I went to the Church of Saint John 



222 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

or the hotels of the ancient knights, or the catacombs 
of the older Christians. 

And here, in this connection, and in conclusion, let 
me refer to two matters, one of literary curiosity, and 
the other of personal interest as respects Scott which 
though familiar story in Great Britain is not so gen- 
erally known here. 

Mr. Lockhart little dreamed of plagiarism — indeed 
was wholly unconscious of it — when, speaking of Scott's 
dying hours, after the final return to Abbotsford, he 
said, " Doctor Watson, having consulted on all things 
with Mr, Olarkson and his father, resigned the patient 
to them and returned to London. None of them could 
have any hope, but that of soothing irritation. Ee- 
covery was no longer to be thought of; but there might 
be euthanasia.'" Ninety-eight years before, on the 
17th July, 1734, Arbuthnot had written to Pope, "A 
recovery in my case and at" my age is impossible ; the 
kindest wish of my friends is eiithanasia." 

Not pausing to discuss the ethical or sentimental 
puzzle of ' first loves,' their sanctity, and involution 
with later entanglements, the fact is unquestionable, 
that Scott never forgot his, and the son-in-law, in 
commemorating his ineradicable sorrow on this head, 
very placidly records that " he never wrote either 
sonnets, or elegies, or monodies, or even an epitaph 
on his wife ; but what an epitaph is his Diary through- 
out, and what a picture have we in his entry about the 
Runic letters which he carved in the day of young 
passion among the grave-stones of St. Andrews!" 
Who that ' first love' was, was unknown to me when 
this essay first appeared in print, and I venture to give 



I 



WALTEH SCOTT. 223 

it to American readers now, as it comes to me from one 
to whom I am at liberty no farther to alhide than as a 
friend of Scott, whom the Diary of October, 1836, 
mentions, as among the kind friends who, on the last 
yisit but one to London, clustered round him, "the 
amiable and very clever young man" of that day. 

"I quite sympathise," he writes, "in the interest 
you feel about the lady as to whose name you inquire 
— the first love of Sir Walter Scott. She was the only 
daughter (said to have been a beautiful blonde) and 
heiress of Sir John Stuart, a landed gentleman of 
Forfarshire ; and slighting the future author of Waver- 
ley, she married Mr. William Forbes, who afterward 
succeeded to a Baronetcy, and was the head of a 
great banking establishment at Edinburgh. The lady 
herself died in or about 1811, and was at that time 
fondly pourtrayed by Sir Walter as the 'Matilda' of 
his 'Rokeby;' Matilda also, as you may recollect, in 
the poem rejecting a young poet and preferring to him 
— not indeed a banker, which would not sound so Avell 
in poetry, but a warrior chief You will find several 
references to her in the later journals of Sir Walter ; 
one passage I recall where he says he met her mother 
by appointment, not having seen her for many years, 
and that they passed the whole evening both in tears for 
the long since departed one." 

It will be thirty-nine years next September since 
Scott died and was buried at Dryburgh, and a century 
next August since he was born. He was but sixty-one 
when he died. Men of taste shrink by a sort of instinct 
Jrom centenaries and unnecessary anniversaries; peri- 
odical commemorations of the spurious or the really 



224 AMONG MY BOOKS 

great ; and yet, if there be an exception, to whom is it 
more justly due than to him who has given to all who 
read this language of ours so much perfectly pure 
enjoyment? 



4 



I 



BULWER'S PALMERSTON. 



Why not a new book as well as old ones ? Why 
not the record of a man just dead as well as his who 
died a century ago ? Why not a Visconnt of Victoria's 
as well as a Visconnt of Queen Anne's day ? Why 
not, toward the end, Henry Temple, as well as Henry 
St. John, with whom these notes began ? Why not 
Palmerston, as a congenial sequel to Bolingbroke? 
Every lawyer-student recollects the ' sublime' yet venial 
egotism with which the Scotch biographer of the 
Chancellors (it is a failing of Whig literary Scotchmen 
to write about themselves), when after recounting 
tlie traditionary and- recorded doings of them all, 
from Sir Thomas More downward, he breaks 
forth: "With these eyes have I closely beheld the 
lineaments of Edward, Lord Thurlow ; with these 
ears have I distinctly heard the deep tones of his 
voice." 

So, in humbler phrase, may I say : these eyes have 
seen Henry, Viscount Palmerston, and watched him 
step jauntily into the lists, as knight sure to win, in 
the House of Commons, the old as well as the new, 
and noted those marvellous reddish-gray whiskers ; and 
these ears have heard the pleasant, cheery voice, Avith 
which, in good Saxon words, he said what he had to 
10* 



226 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

say. Mine was the lot to see and hear him at long 
intervals, and each time when a leader of opposition, 
though with his foot surely planted on the threshold 
of power — in 1845 in the only surviving room (I be- 
lieve) of old St, Stephen's, when he was sixty-one years ^ 
of age, and in 1859, when he was seventy-five; and he 
seemed, if not as young, quite as full of vitality at last 
as at first. It was on the edge of the brief but mo- 
mentous disturbance of 1859, the Franco-Italian- Aus- 
trian war, for on my way of travel westward the Alpine 
passes were crowded with Sardinian soldiers returning 
from furlough, and Cavour was on the same train with 
us going to consult Napoleon, and France was power- 
ful, and Wilhelmshohe was not dreamed of Then 
was it, that on a night of early April, 1859, the opposi- 
tion taunted Lord Derby's government with inactivity 
not masterly, and Lord Palmerston led the attack, not 
at all acrimoniously, and D'Israeli, then Chancellor of 
the Exchequer, replied (the words are in my ears yet), 
warning them of ' the especial danger of a continental 
war in exciting the hopes and obtruding the preten- 
sions of dynastic aspirants, scattered everywhere, whom 
tranquillity disarmed,' and the Orleans Princes were 
eagerly listening in the gallery ; and now, Palmerston 
is dead and irretrievable ruin has settled all pretensions 
and usurpations; and the great bugbear, which Sir 
Henry Bulwer tells us 'frightened England and forced 
and kept her in war,' — a sea-coast from the Elbe to 
Ushant in the hands of a single Power — seems aljout to 
be realized, though in a form widely different from that 
which then haunted her. 

Yet Parliament and constitutional government and 



BULWEES PALMERSTON. 227 

free discussion still stand, and seem more likely to 
stand than they did when the knights and burgesses 
met six hundred years ago. And here, annotating this 
pleasant but rather disappointing book, a word as to 
Parliamentary eloquence, past and present. Is it 
deteriorating ? This is not an easy question to answer, 
for the simple reason that, while between reported 
speeches of different periods comparisons may be 
made, the great ' reserve,' to use a military phrase, on 
which the praiser of the past falls back, are Parlia- 
mentaiy traditions — Avliat great orators are said to have 
done ; Bolingbroke's lost orations, for which the younger 
Pitt mourned ; Charles Townsend's champagne, and 
Hamilton's ' single speech ;' Sheridan on the Begum 
charge, or Fox on the Westminster secretary. There 
is no measuring them. Lord Chatham comes to us in 
rather a peculiar form, for though reporting was no 
science in his day, there were exceptional reporters 
even then, and he had in Philip Francis one who wor- ' 
shipped at his feet and had a kindred spirit within 
him, and knew how to report him characteristically. 
There are passages in the remnants of the speeches of 
the elder Pitt, as reported by Francis, which stir the 
blood as we read them now. The biographer of Pal- 
merston long ago told the writer of these notes that he 
had conversed with one (Earl Fi.tzwilliam) who had 
heard and remembered Lord Chatham. He spoke of 
the general tone as being conversational, and not at 
all declamatory, only occasionally breaking into vehe- 
mence and animation. How unlike the popular notion ! 
The conversational part has evaporated, — the vehement 
declamation survives. And here let me, in passing, 



ii28 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

note a practical perplexity about these orators of 
vehemence. Demosthenes had as full scope at Athens 
as on the seaside, and so had Mirabeau with the 
Notables, and Pitt in the House of Commons ; but a 
fierce, railing declamation, with loud voice and exag- 
gerated gesture, in a room no larger than that in which 
Chatham spoke after he was translated, seems an im- 
possibility. It was much better suited to what these 
ears have listened to, a shrewish squabble between two 
old men across a red table, the actors being Lords 
Brougham and Campbell. But still greater is the 
difficulty in comprehending these picturesque tradi- 
tions in the case of our own ' forest-born Demosthenes.' 
Any one who has visited Carpenter's Hall in Philadel- 
phia, a plain, modest building, up an alley, worth his- 
torically fifty Faneuil Halls, not yet disfigured with 
cracked bells, and Liberty caps, and William Penn's 
corpulence, as is Independence Hall, and looked at the 
room, not twenty feet square, where the old Continental 
Congress sat — a body never exceeding thirty or forty in 
number — any one going there may well wonder how, 
in such a compass and to such an audience, Patrick 
Henry could have made such speeches as he did. And 
yet it must have been so, for has not Mr. Wirt in stilted 
phrase described it, and Mr. Eothermel painted it, in 
colours no less gaudy ? Art is not, we know, always to 
be relied on, for in this very case of Mr. Henry, the 
portrait which purports to pourtray his lineaments 
was a copy of one of Captain Cook on Arrowsmith's 
map of the world, some one having fancied there 
was a resemblance between the navigator and the 
oratnr. 



BULWEWS PAUIEltSTON. 229 

With this passing protest, I accept the traditions of 
Parliamentary and Congressional eloquence. As to 
that of the House of Commons there can be no ques- 
tion. In connection with it, there is what always 
seemed to me a very precious though incomplete vol- 
ume, but which, strange to say, is not to be found in 
Mr. Xstor's Library, generally in this department so 
rich — Sir Henry Cavendish's Debates from 1768 or 
17G9 to 1774, taken on the spot in short-hand, and 
partially deciphered and edited (for he died at his 
work) by the eminent parliamentologist, Mr. Wright. 
There, we catch the conversational spirit of the dis- 
cussions of that day, when Fox and Burke were young 
men, and before the latter began to speak essays; 
there we can measure George Grenville's stately cold 
formality, and get an idea (the only place I know of) 
of an orator whom America ought to honour, but who 
is strangely neglected, Henry Conway, who had the 
good luck, as was said of Lord Rockingham and 
Burke, ' to have his portrait set in diamonds' by Wal- 
pole. Here it is we find the best revelations of Lord 
North as a debater, always able, always coiirteous, 
the incarnation of genial wit, whom accident and a 
crazed,- bigoted master made our enemy. He never, 
or so rarely that 'never' may be said, used an unkind 
word; and tradition is rich in his good-humoured 
clever sayings. His pleasant ' There's nothing like 
being in the secret, gentlemen,' is one of the Joe 
Millers of Parliament. Another, — told, if I remember 
rightly, in Mr. McKnight's Life of Burke, — is less 
familiar, when he said on some occasion when the 
Episcopal bench 'divided' against him, "That the 



230 AMONG MY BOOKS. 



m 



first tiling the bishops were apt to forget was their 
Maker." There is somewhere on record a specimen 
of Episcopal eloquence of a later day than Lord 
North, which is rather Chathamic. In a debate on 
the slave-trade at the beginning of this century, 
Bishop Horsley said, "What is the language of St. 
Paul ?" At this some of the peers laughed. * The 
angry bishop turned on them with : " My lords, when 
I quote the words of a holy apostle, I expect to be lis- 
tened to, not only with reverence, but with awe." There 
are charming recollections of Lord North in his old 
age, preserved by his grand-daughter, familiar to every 
historical student. 

Lord Palmerston saw the light just at the close of 
Lord North's political career, the close of the coali- 
tion ministry, and the beginning of the younger 
Pitt's long administration, and from birth in 1784 to 
death in 1870, was the golden age of English Parlia- 
mentary story. He was an actor all the time. He 
was twenty-two when Pitt and Fox died. He was the 
contemporary of those who had seen Warren Hastings 
impeached and had heard the glorious debating which 
England's entangled policy, during the French Eevo- 
lution, provoked. In that era there was one man to 
whom Lord Palmerston's meagre journal, as now given, 
does injustice, and whom the critical student will not 
fail to recall as one of the most brilliant, though with a 
milder light than the great planets, of the Parlia- 
mentarians of the times. I speak of Mr. Windham, 
the embodiment of all that is graceful in the character 
of a Tory Englishman of sixty years ago, Avithout any 
of its coarseness. His speeches, tolerably reported, 



BULWEE8 PALMERSTON. 231 

though evidently not revised, are charming, and emi- 
nently characteristic of the manly man. He detested 
French Kepublicanism and Bonapartism as cordially 
as did Mr. Burke or Lord Grenville. He loathed 
Parliamentary reform. He defended bull-baiting and 
prize-fighting, and said so with a candour which would 
startle Mr. Bergh out of his propriety. He had a 
sovereign contempt for all shams, including sham 
philanthropy, and he said what he thought in the 
plainest and simplest, and, therefore, the most grace- 
ful English. 'He was/ says a most competent judge, 
the late Lord Lansdowne, 'the most agreeable speaker 
I ever listened to.' It was he Avho called the press the 
' Fourth Estate.' Windham was Secretary of War in 
'"all the talents." Lord Palmerston was one of the 
ministry which succeeded them, though not in the 
cabinet till three years later. Mr. Windham died in 
ISIO, when Palmerston was twenty-six. 

His biographer does not tell us much of the boy 
Palmerston, and the skeleton of an autobiography, put 
into an appendix, tells less. Perhaps education pro- 
ducing fruits as it did then, and developing so busy 
and eminently practical a man, had no salient points 
on which biography could fasten ; perhaps the biog- 
rapher desired to hasten to that period Avhen he him- 
self could appear as an actor and a witness. Lord 
Palmerston tells the story very curtly : " I left Harrow 
at eleven, and went for three years to Edinburgh. I 
lived with Dugald Stewart and attended the lectures 
at the University. In those three years I laid tbe foun- 
dation of whatever useful knowledge and habits of 
mij\d I possess." In 1807, he was in Parliament, and 



232 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

we have tlie scraps of a jonrnal, not very sprightly in 
itself, and which, as most sensible men do, he very soon 
discontinued. The pleasant letters which, while in the 
Admiralty, he writes to his sisters, are far better than 
the diary or the biographer's text. It was the time of 
the second action of England against Denmark, in 
Angnst, 1807 — the Nelson attack on Copenhagen 
having been six years before — and Sir Henry Bulwer, 
in illustration, quotes without comment (for it needed 
none) a curious letter, which one reads now with in- 
terest, from Napoleon on the subject. It is dated on 
the 2d of August, 1807, twenty days before Admiral 
Gambler seized the Danish fleet, and is addressed to 
Bernadotte, ' Governor of the Hanseatic cities.' I note 
but one jihrase: 'If England does not accept the 
Eussian mediation' (Alexander and Napoleon had just 
been rafting it on the Niemen) ' Denmark must declare 
war, or I shall declare war on Denmark. In this last 
case it will be your duty to take possession of the whole 
Danish continent.' He did not seem to care for the 
islands. Such was he whom Americans were once 
taught to reverence! There is something of melan- 
choly justice in the recollection that one of Napoleon's 
greatest outrages on our young nation Avas a decree 
dated at Berlin.* 

This book is very cursory in portions of the narra- 



* In Lord Malmesbury's correspondence is a letter to him from the 
then Lord Granville, dated in July, 1802, where Napoleon is described 
as ending a conversation, held " en face, a la Reine et au Roi," -with 
these words : — " Je sens qu'a I'avenir il doit y avoir unc haine implac- 
able contre nous de la part dcs Prussiens, mais je veux et dois les 
mettrc hors d'etat de mc nuire." 



BUL WEE'S PALMERSTOK 233 

tivo, and the reader finds himself, almost without knoAV- 
ing it, brought down — the Percivals and Liverpools 
and Castlereaghs of the interval being hardly noticed — 
to Mr. Canning's brief ministry of 1827, when Lord 
Palmerston, having been successively offered the places 
of Goverhor of Jamaica, at which he says he burst out 
laughing, and Governor-General of India, Avhither 
Canning had once nearly gone, became Secretary of 
War, And here, as these are desultory, — very desul- 
tory notes, and in no sense a review, let me recall an- 
other instance in my experience of dissipated prejudice. 
In the days — long since gone by — when, as I have said, 
Americans were taught to idolize Naj^oleon, there were 
correlative objects of detestation. We had thoroughly 
Imbibed English whiggery (more intensely hostile to us 
than toryism ever was), and believed in Holland House 
and Tom Moore. Of course the hete noir was Lord 
Castlereagh. Now, if any reasonable man or studious 
boy desires to have this folly purged away, let him read, 
as I have faithfully. Lord Castlereagh's diplomatic cor- 
respondence when, in 1814, he Avas controlling the 
Anti-Napoleonic policy of Europe. He will then see 
what a brave, manly spirit animated this disparaged 
statesman. This is specially marked in the letters from 
Chatillon, and show that it Avas English sturdiness 
Avhich finally broke doAvn Napoleon.* Of that quality, 
be it high and heroic or not, this Irish viscount Avas 
the genuine representative. Of him, however, it Avas 
not the cue of Lord Palmerston or his biographer 



* See Sir Henry Bulwer's estimate of liim in his delightful " His- 
torical Characters," vol. ii. p. 259. 



234 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

to say much, for they are Canningites of the straitest 
- sect. 

Of their idol's praises, one might have looked for 
more. The truth, however, is that, brilliant as was 
the subordinate career of Canning as wit and debater 
and orator, his primacy was a brief and ti'oubled one. 
He never flashed more brightly than at the end, and 
it was as Prime Minister, in 1837, that he made his 
celebrated speech on "redressing the balance of the 
world," Surely there never was more supreme egotism 
or vaster bombast than his boast, " I called the New 
World into existence to redress the balance of the Old" 
• — history telling us that in the recognition of the 
Spanish-American republics, to which he referred, 
James Monroe and Henry Clay had anticipated George 
Canning. And yet the boast was rhetorically effective, 
for we learn from a critic by no means friendly, that 
the vigour of the language and the magnificent elocu- 
tion of the orator carried away the House of Commons 
in a perfect storm. Moore tells us in his diary that 
Sir James Graham came to a dinner party fresh from 
the scene, and said that " the best comment on the 
power of the speaker was that he could reconcile a 
severe audience like the House of Commons to such 
bombast as this." It was in this or a coincident speech 
that Mr. Canning announced, when the Holy Alliance 
menaced the Peninsula, that British troops had actually 
sailed to the rescue: "We go to plant the standard of 
England on the well-known heights of Lisbon. Where 
that standard is planted foreign dominion shall not 
come." This has the true ring. There is, hoAvever, 
something uncomfortable about Canning's wliole career. 



BULWERS PALMERSTOK 235 

K'ot that we need adopt the Carlton House story (for, 
to their honour be it said, George IV. hated botli 
Canning and Palmerston with a hate sincere, though 
Canning conquered it), that he was, as Lord Yarmoutli 
called him, 'a scamp;' but he was a born manojuvrer, 
and there is nothing more melancholy in political story 
than the record, as given in the Malmesbury diary, of 
the successful intrigue, directed by the veteran diplo- 
matist, the old lion of the Foreign Office, and manipu- 
lated by his younger ally, against Mr. Addington for 
trying to makepeace with France in 1801. Canning's 
triumphant bark came to sudden shipwreck in 1828, 
among the coral reefs of an alien and adverse aristoc- 
racy. There is told of him an anecdote of American 
Interest, which seems droll, not so much from the 
cleverness of what he jocularly said, as the stupendous 
gravity with which it is narrated by the most formal 
and least jocose of chroniclers, the late Mr. Eichard 
Rush, in his Eeminiscences. It was the fresh day of 
that venerable and inconvenient dogma, the Monroe 
Doctrine, and Mr. Rush tells us that when he communi- 
cated the dogma " that the United States would not 
permit or countenance any European power to colonize 
any part of the American continent," Mr. Canning 
asked if the President meant to interfere with any new 
discovery that Captain Parry, then in the Polar Seas, 
might make? To which Mr. Rush replied: "When 
such a contingency occurred, it would be properly 
considered!" Jesting apart, no Canningite, not the 
founder, not his nephew, not Lord Palmerston, no one, 
unless it be Sir Henry Bulwer, ever had, or pretended 
to have, any especial love for us Americans. 



236 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

The year 1828 brings us (for in less than two hun- 
dred pages of the first volume is told the crowded stoiy 
of forty-four years) to the Duke of Wellington— not 
soldier, but politician — and Palmerston, Chancellor of 
the Exchequer in the Goderich ministry — and the 
Duke's first appearance is as a manager, and a 
dexterous one too. Lord Palmerston records in his 
diary that when the Duke of Wellington was 
made commander-in-chief, his military friend. Lord 
Anglesea, came to his colleagues and said: "Well, 
gentlemen, I have done what you sent me to do. I 
have brought you the Duke of Wellington's acceptance 
as commander-in-chief, and, by God, mark my words, 
as sure as you are alive he will trip up all your heels 
before six months are over your heads." And Lord 
Palmerston simply adds : " Before the six months were 
well over the Duke was in and our heels were up !" 

These notes are neither history nor systematic criti- 
cism, but are meant to record random and casual im- 
pressions, not only of a book but of the associations, 
sometimes remote, it awakens. Hence it is aside from 
their aim and irreconcilable with their limits, to follow 
throughout the course of personal or historical inci- 
dents. The second volume of this biography extends 
from 1831 to 1841, the most of which time, Palmerston 
was a leading actor, and then it was that h.\B2}rotege 
(and well worthy of confidence he was) the biog- 
rapher appears on the scene. It is, after all, the true 
way to have biography written, when hero and biog- 
rapher move, as it were, together. Sir Henry does it 
very gracefully, and with no excess of the first person 
sino-ular. We underst.md both men much better than 



BULWEBS PALMERSTON. 237 

we could by the study of Blue Books, as when Lord 
Palmerstou Avrites to Mr. Bulwer, in Paris, at the crisis 
of the Egyptian muddle in 1840 : " Bullies seldom 
execute the threats they deal in ; and men of trick are 
not always men of desperate resolves. But if Thiers 
should again hold to you the language of menace, 
however indistinctly and vaguely shadowed forth, pray 
retort upon him to the full extent of what he says ; 
and with that skill of language which I know you are 
master of, convey to him in the most friendly and 
inoffensive manner possible, that, if France throws 
down the gauntlet, we shall not refuse to piclf it up ; 
and that, if she begins a Avar, she will to a certainty 
lose her ships, colonies, and commerce before she sees 
the end of it ; that her army in Algiers will cease to 
give her anxiety, and that Mehemet Ali will be just 
chucked into the Nile. I invariably do this when 
Gruizot begins to swagger," These were the words, the 
insolent, brave words, of 1841, when perhaps Thiers 
did bully and Guizot swaggered. And now. thirty 
years are over, and the voice of insolence is no more 
heard, and Thiers and Guizot are fugitives, and France 
is prostrate ; and if there be any truth in what, in that 
same year, 1841, Palmerston wrote to Lord Granville, 
and Sir Henry Bulwer italicizes : " The aggressive pol- 
icy of France is like an infection clinging to the walls 
of a dwelling. It breaks out in every successive occu- 
pant that comes within its influence," — there is no 
longer any danger, for the building, purged by fire, is 
in ruins, and its mischievous occupants scattered 
everywhere ! 



AMERICAN HISTORY. 



The temptation to be for once didactic is irresisti- 
ble, and as undne gravity, some readers will say, has 
not characterized these fugitive 'notes' a little sober, 
serious teaching may be pardoned at the end. Then, 
too, it is in behalf of oppressed and gentle youth these 
Avords are written. In a suburban village, Avhich shall 
be nameless, a bright young girl, the other day, was 
pondering, with aching brain and frowning brow, over 
what, in school phrase, is called a ' review' of lessons 
in American history, and, on inquiry as to the cause 
of perplexity, it was revealed that the military opera- 
tions on the Chickahominy and the pleasant details of 
the Eebellion were the subject of academic medita- 
tion ; and this was called studying American history ! 
That all this will, by-and-by, be history for study, and 
sad, significant history too, is certain, but not yet ! 
The minds of children, North, and, if possible, South, 
one would think, might as well be left free from the 
bitter memories of yesterday. And this child knew 
little or nothing of Columbus, or Cabot, or Ealeigh, or 
even Washington! Doubtless, she knew (as who in ' 
this region does not?) the day and hour and minute 
when the Mayflower Avas 'entered' in the Plymouth 
Custom-house, but naught besides. JamestoAvn is ta- 



AMERICAN HISTORY. 239 

booed, and 'Romish' Saint Mary's has no place in this 
canon. Yet American history may be taught, and 
may be made attractive to tlie veriest youth, and a vis- 
ion has, many a time and oft, floated round one rest- 
less brain, that American " Tales of a Grandfather" 
might well and gracefully be written. Who has for- 
gotten how the first ' Tales' came into being ? 

" A good thought," Scott writes, " has come into my 
hea(J, to write stories for my little grandson from the 
history of Scotland, like those taken from the history 
of England. But I will not write mine quite so sim- 
ply. I am persuaded both children and the lower 
class of men hate books which are written down to 
their capacity, and love those which are composed 
more for their elders and betters. I will make, if pos- 
sible, a book which a child shall understand, yet a man 
will feel some temptation to peruse, should he chance 
to take it up. It will require, however, a simplicity of 
style not quite my own. The grand and interesting 
consists in ideas, not in words. A clever thing of this 
kind might have a race." 

The child, the little grandson, for whom this charm- 
ing book was written, was then exactly six years old ; 
and the practical sagacity which prompted Scott not 
to write too far down for children, was verified. Every 
one knows the complete success of the experiment, in 
its fascination, not only of the six-year-old boy, but of 
all the reading boys of England and Scotland — I wish 
I could add of America, but unhappily the minds of 
American children are afflicted by downward writing, 
by too much of the system of instruction suited (such 
is the Avretched misnomer) to the youngest capacity. 



2J:0 AiMONG 31 Y BOOKS. 

wliicli labours to keep it in all the helplessness and fee- 
bleness of childhood. 

Mj theory of systematic study of these annals of 
ours is somewhat in this wise : 

The discovery and settlement should, of course, be 
starting-points. I would make them strictly so; and 
this, as a mode of adapting the study to the youngest 
minds. If it were thought necessary, in elementary 
instruction, to consider American as an offset or shoot 
from European story, then the boy must have in ad- 
vance some knowledge of the history of the nations 
whence the discoverers and first settlers came, and 
American history must be postponed. But, on the 
other hand, if the boy be taught that when Columbus 
and Cabot put to sea on their Westward adventure, 
they began a new career, then little or no previous 
knowledge is requisite. The scholar begins with 
American discovery. And what practical difficulty or 
objection is there to this? The child who learns 
Eoman history is not troubled with Homeric legends 
or Etruscan antiquities, but setting out with iEneas' 
.farrowing sow, or the cradle of Eomulus and Eemus, 
learns the history of Rome from its beginning. So with 
English and all other annals. Taking for illustration 
the New England and Virginia settlements, why may 
not the intelligent child (for it is now a question of 
cliildish instruction) learn, as a beginning, that the 
adventurers, seeking a place of refuge, crossed the 
Atlantic and began settlements at Jamestown and 
Plymouth, — their privations and courage, their primi- 
tive habits, their wars with the savages, their gradual 
growtl], ni'glif- ho picturesquely told, without reference 



AMERICAN HISTORY. 241 

to the history, the perplexed previous history of the 
fatherland; and thus a series of impressions of Ameri- 
can incidents be stamped that would, if distinct, never 
be obliterated. Of course, as the narrative advanced 
and complex relations arose abroad when the settle- 
ment, growing in importance, became properly a col- 
ony subject to metropolitan authority, the student 
will be directed to this foreign authority. But it 
would be purely incidental. The main narrative of 
American events need not be interrupted. European 
history would be illustrative. Of course, I shall not 
be understood as meaning to sever American from 
British history, or as broaching the absurd theory that 
the principles out of which our Eevolution sprang were 
not in a measure derivative. No one can be blind to 
the clear connection between the principles of English 
lil^erty, as embalmed in the English law, and those 
which were invoked and asserted when they cast off the 
British yoke. The inheritance of the sturdy common 
law is ours ; the security of parliamentary law is ours 
too. No one can study thoroughly without knowing all 
about this and other transatlantic association. But I 
refer to this mode of isolating American events as a 
necessary and convenient mode of placing them at first 
within the grasp of a very youthful mind. It is entirely 
feasible, if this process of simplification be adhered 
to ; and, if the instructor succeed in making distinct 
and intelligible his narrative of early American adven- 
ture and settlement, he will find his pupils better able 
at the end of a given period to comprehend the more 
complex relations of groAving society. Of course, in 
this it may be necessary to appeal largely to the im- 

11 



242 AMONG 31 Y BOOKS. 

agination of young students ; and, luckily, tlie history 
of adventurous colonists admits this. It is fortunate, 
too, that from the story of the American first settlers, 
lessons of no little moral value may be learned ; and 
the intelligent child who is made to understand them 
is taught the merit of heroism and endurance, of self- 
control and self-reliance, in a way which keeps him 
from ever forgetting them. Our children should learn 
their story thoroughly, poetically, and reverentially. 
Such were the views of that great teacher, Dr. Arnold, 
as to history generally. 

" These illustrative pictures," says he, " should con- 
tain as much as possible the poetry of history — the 
most striking characters and most heroic actions, 
whether of doing or suffering — but they should not 
embarrass themselves with its philosophy, with the 
causes of revolutions, the progress of society, or the 
merits of great political questions. Their use is of 
another kind, to make some great name and great 
action of every period familiar to the mind ; and so, in 
taking up any more detailed history or biography (and 
education should never forget the importance of pre- 
paring a boy to derive benefit from accidental reading), 
he may have some association with the subject of it, 
and may not find himself on ground wholly unknown 
to him. He may thus be led to open volumes into 
which he would otherwise have never thought of look- 
ing. He need not read them through; indeed it is 
sad folly to require either man or boy to read through 
every book they look at, but he will see what is said 
about such and such persons and actions, and will 
have his stock of associations increased, so as to render 



AMERICAN HISTORY. 243 

more and more information acceptable to him. After 
this foundation, the object still being rather to create 
an appetite for knowledge than to satisfy it, it would 
be desirable to furnish a boy with histories of one or 
two particular countries, Greece, Eome, and England 
for instance, written at no great length, and writ- 
ten poetically, much more than philosophically, with 
much liveliness of style and force of painting, so as 
to excite an interest about the persons and things 
spoken of. The absence of all instruction in politics 
or political economy, nay, even an erroneousness of 
judgment on such matters, provided always that it 
involves no wrong principles of morality, are compara- 
tively of slight importance. Let the boy gain, if possible, 
a strong appetite for knowledge to begin with ; it is the 
later part of education which should enable him to pur- 
sue it sensibly, and to make it, when obtained, wisdom." 
Passing to the colonial times and to a period of 
higher development in the student, the chief difficulty 
will be in the variety of materials. But there is no- 
tliing formidable in this. An intelligent boy can easily 
be made to understand that the narrow belt of civilized 
settlement on the Atlantic coast, from Canada to 
Florida, was inhabited by one people, or rather that 
one sovereign authority was recognized, whilst, within 
local divisions, they had governments of their own. 
He can as easily learn, for the difference is well defined, 
what these governments were, and how charter and 
l^roprietary and royal colonies are distinguished. The 
growth of colonial society is easily traced. The influ- 
ence of an Indian frontier can be defined, with all its 
romantic horrors. He can form an idea of the wonder- 



244 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

fill, though impotent, scheme of empire by which 
France girdled the British settlements by a chain of 
armed missionary posts from Quebec to the Balize. 
It is for those only who have not studied it to deny 
the interest — the captivating interest — of the French 
and Indian wars, the bloody prowess of Montcalm and 
Dieskau. It is for such to say that the minds of 
American youth, I care not how immature, may not 
find attractions here. Neither Marathon nor Ther- 
mopylae, Cannae nor Actium, need be neglected, but 
the American student may learn the actual deeds of 
border warfare against savages and European merce- 
naries with as much interest, and profit too, as any 
legend of antique romance. There is a storehouse of 
incident in the memoirs of the French ecclesiastical 
emigrants, yet unexplored; and as to practical lessons 
in the chronicles of these early times, I say, incident- 
ally, that my mind has always fastened with curious 
interest on the lesson of one colonial life, which, for 
the benefit of American youth, I trust may some day 
be illustrated better than it has been. I mean the 
development of Washington's character as marked in 
his early provincial training and adventure. His 
mother-guarded education, his use of humble oppor- 
tunities, his copy-books, his self-devised rules of con- 
duct, his geometrical calculations, his rough books of 
survey (all yet extant), and, at a later period, his wild 
adventures in the Western wilderness, and the heavy 
responsibilities, so nobly borne, of his early manhood; 
all these are materials of biography which might be 
made to win the attention and repay the studious 
curiosity of any boy or man. In fact, if simplification 



AMERICAN HISTORY. 245 

of education he still thought important, there would 
he no hetter mode of treating the last part of colonial, 
and the first of independent history, than by making 
it illustrative of the single career of Washington, from 
the date of his first public trust, when sent, at the age 
of twenty-one, by Governor Dinwiddle (1753) as a 
Virginian Ambassador to St. Pierre's camp on the 
Imnks of French Creek, to his final retirement from 
public life nearly half a century later, at the end of 
Mr. Adams's qiiasi war, in 1798. The classic history 
of America is in this single life, and yet how few 
American students so consider it! They are content 
to call him "the father of his country," and "first in 
war," etc., and know less of his history in detail than 
of Epaminondas or Publicola. 

The reader will understand the natural association 
which, in noticing these early incidents of our history 
and Washington's life, prompts me to refer to the fol- 
lowing striking contrast from a valuable though un- 
known periodical.* It was written twenty-five years 
ago: 

"It is now almost one hundred years since Brad- 
dock received his death-wound in the vicinity of 
Pittsburg, and the field where his army was defeated, 

* ' Pittsburg Olden Time,' 1846, p. 525, edited by the late Neville 
B. Craig. It is referred to with commendation by Mr. Parkman, in 
his ' Conspiracy of Pontiac,' and is a rich mine of original matter. 
Great are the obligations of the student of histoiy to such pains- 
taking men, among the dead, as Neville B. Craig and Samuel 
Hazard of Pennsylvania, and AVinthrop Sergeant, of New York; 
and among the living, eminently to Henry B. Dawson, of Mor- 
risania. 



246 AMONO MY BOOKS. 

■wliicli was then far beyond the frontier of the Anglo- 
Saxon settlement, is now bnt a point on the great 
ronte of travel from the East to the far-distant West. 
Probably, in the whole history of our country, no 
more striking illustration can be given of the exten- 
sion of our power than the overthrow of the English 
army at Braddock's Field in 1755, and the capture of 
Monterey in 1846. In India, the year after Brad- 
dock's defeat, the English sustained severe losses, Cal- 
cutta fell into the enemy's hands, and British affairs 
seemed as hopeless in Asia as in America, but the 
appointment of Clive in the former and Amherst in 
the latter soon gave a more encouraging aspect to 
public aifairs in both countries. From that period to 
the present the Anglo-Saxon race in both countries 
has extended its dominions with unexampled rapidity. 
The capture of Calcutta on the Ganges, and the defeat 
of Braddock on the Monongahela, in 1755 and 1757, 
mark the extreme points of depression of Anglo-Saxon 
affairs on both continents; when they are to reach 
the utmost extent in advance and prosperity, time 
alone can tell." As these words are written, we have 
the news that Pondicherry, all that remains of French 
empire in Asia, has gone from her too. 

By the time the student has got to the verge of the 
convulsion, he will have knowledge enough to fit him 
for more exact inquiries. From the peace of Paris to 
the first shedding of blood at Lexington, there is not a 
year whose history is not full of interest. 

On one side, it is to be found in parliamentary 
debates, statutes, and orders in council. It is a period 
in regard to which the common notion is singularly 



AMEBIVAN iimroBY. 247 

inexact. Its true history is not yet written. Grahame 
has done the best for it. Its incidents should be 
traced, one by one, from the day when a penny-wise 
minister of the crown conceived the idea of raising 
specific revenue from America, through the long se- 
ries of parliamentary expedients and equivocations, 
stamp acts, declaratory laws, tea duties, down to the 
day when accidental blood-shedding broke the bond 
forever. This, and the remonstrances, the supplica- 
tions on our side, which preceded resistance, should 
be minutely understood. Without it, no one can pre- 
tend to measure the true merit of our Revolution, and 
its difference from all others in the history of man- 
kind. It can never be said of us, or of our ancestors 
of the Revolution, as was once said by Niebuhr of 
some later Republicans, that we were "proud of the 
title of slaves broke loose." The student should be 
made to study the enumeration of actual grievances in 
the Declaration of Independence rather than its ques- 
tionable rhetoric and its false philosophy, and to point 
out the evidence, which a little study will enable him 
to do, on which each assertion of a wrong rests. It 
has been truly said that the vitality of the instrument 
of Independence itself Avas its specification of sub- 
stantial grievances — not the assertion of abstract 
rights of man. There is authority for saying, that in 
Great Britain its platitudes made no impression, but 
such a business-like phrase as "enemies in Avar, in 
peace friends," did. "It shows," says Lord Camden 
to the Duke of Grafton, speaking of these very Avordg, 
" that the empire is rent asuiidef," Yet hoAv few are 
there of the thoiisands avLo read and listen every ye^-r. 



248"* AMONG MT BOOKS. 

in the routine of patriotic festivity, who, if asked 
to verify any or all of the accusations of metropoli- 
tan power, would be able to answer the appeal ? To 
teach the student to look behind the mere declama- 
tion of patriotism, is an object worthy of attention. 
He should learn the deliberate character of revolution- 
ary redress. He should learn it minutely, accurately, 
and impartially. He should learn to discriminate be- 
tween the just and unjust causes of complaint; for 
there were some, though few, of the latter — and his 
pride when, thus nurtured in rational reverence for 
the founders of his country's conservative freedom, he 
comes to be an American man, will rest on a steadier 
and a safer basis than mere unreasoning patriotism 
can supply. 

The Kevolution itself can be studied in detail most 
agreeably. Its military story, minutely told, is full of 
interest ; for though its battles were skirmishes in con- 
trast with the campaigning of later times, yet is it not 
worth while for an American student to learn how, in 
ancient days, on little more than a month's notice, a 
rude militia first besieged and then vanquished (for 
inglorious retreat is defeat) a British army led by 
veteran generals and strong in all the accomplish- 
ments of war ? How the same raw levies ripened into 
armies of regularity and discipline ? Those were times 
when "great men led little armies, but little armies 
did great things." This was Antony Hamilton's say- 
ing : " En ce temps," he says, " il n'en alloit pas en 
France comme a present : Louis XIII. regnoit encore, 
et le Cardinal de Eichelieu gouvernoit le royaume. De 
gr;nv1shoninu'S conimanduient de pctites annees, et cos 



AMERICAN HISTORY. 249 

armees faisoient de grandes clioses." He will see, too, 
tliat there are worthier glories than those of victory, 
and, from careful and systematic study, will do more 
honour than he ever dreamed of for the laurels of 
Trenton and Princeton, to Washington in his hour of 
overwhelming disaster, his young army cut to pieces 
and seeking refuge within the lines of Brooklyn, and 
his resolute spirit in the desolate camp at Valley 
Forge. For six long years, was he the victim of rasli 
counsels and imperfect means; urged by a military 
department (such as it was) to action, and left by its 
improvidence in vexatious helplessness. The Ameri- 
can student who makes himself master of Washing- 
ton's letters to Congress, to his friends at home, and 
his distant fellow-soldiers, will have a rationally ex- 
alted estimate of his character, such as he never before 
imagined. He will by pure processes of reason become 
the 'idolater,' which, strange to say, Thackeray is re- 
proached for being, and that, too, by a New England 
writer of repute.* 

From May, 1775, when the Eevolutionary Congress 
first met as a business body, down to the institution 
of the executive departments in 1781, its action is 
worthy of the closest study. How it was constituted, 
how it grew, and how wisely and patriotically, as a 
general rule, it acted, should be understood by all 
American men. The old Congress is not benefitted by 
comparison with the noisy and declamatory body of 
a later day. It was in the strict sense of the word 
'deliberative,' almost conversational. It sate in an 



* ' The Virginians,' chapter 87. 
11^- 



250 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

apartment not larger than a common dining-room. 
It was not a speech-making or speech-listening body. 
It worked well. For the first few years, it was busy 
with desperate experiments of currency and credit, 
raising soldiers, clothing and arming them, and all the 
while distrustful of its own imperfect organization, 
and striving to build up something in the way of gov- 
ernment stronger and safer. And here let me do hon- 
our to the discredited but not dishonoured dead, the 
maligned Confederation ! It did good service in its 
day. It was an honestly written document — those 
Articles. It meant what it said. It was not, like an- 
other instrument of later date, veneered or varnished 
with rhetoric, which cracked, and was meant to crack, 
the moment it was subjected to heat. Gouverneur 
Morris, although lie signed it, did not tinker it, and 
then boast he had made it ambiguous on purpose. It 
bore the names of Roger Sherman, and Oliver Wol- 
cott, and Robert Morris, and Joseph Reed, and William 
Henry Drayton, and the Lees; and it declared itself — 
alas ! for human forecast ! — ' perpetual.' 

In 1781, Congress relinquished to three executive 
officers its active functions, settling down into a nega- 
tive attitude ; and here the student Avill find a new 
chapter of great interest. I refer to Robert Morris's 
financial administration. Of Mr. Morris's services the 
prevalent idea is not an exact one. In the common 
praise bestowed on him as the great financier of the 
Revolution, dates are strangely confounded. As an 
executive officer he had nothing to do Avith federal 
finance till five months before Cornwallis's surrender, 
when the war virtually ended. He had been a mem- 



AMERICAN HISTORY. 251 

ber of Congress and of the State Legislature, but no- 
thing more. In the latter position, he had done good 
service in fighting tender laws and price regulations, 
errors into which the purest and some of the most 
intelligent of our public men fell; but with federal 
finance, till then, he had nothing to do. His labours 
were, if possible, more burdensome, more admirable, 
than if they had been in the midst of the perils of war 
and its attendant enthusiasm, which helps finance 
wonderfully. He came into office when credit had 
collapsed and the day of expedients was over, and sus- 
tained public faith at a moment of perilous transi- 
tion, when the instincts of self-interest cast back on 
the country its worthless currency, and revenue was 
mocked by its own devices. Tliat, at this moment of 
prostration, when the chances of healthy reaction were 
as nothing, he should have succeeded in maintaining 
anything like ' revenue,' and in building up order, 
is Mr. Morris's true glory. How he did it, the student 
learns from his official letters. It has always seemed 
to me that nowhere can the practical part of political 
finance be better studied than in these letters of a far- 
seeing merchant, who, called to public trust, adminis- 
tered it on the same principles which guided him in 
his counting-room. There is, in them, none of the jar- 
gon of finance, but a simplicity and directness of style 
eminently characteristic. 

Coincident with what was doing at home, are the 
foreign relations of the country and the curious yet 
unsolved problem as to who showed the truest wisdom, 
Franklin, or his less confiding colleagues, Mr. Jay and 
Mr. Adams. From the time when Beaumarchais first 



252 AJIOXG Jir BOOKS. 

sounded Arthur Lee, to the signing of the preliminary 
Treaty, through all our unskilled diplomacy, the mys- 
terious incident of the robbing of the American lega- 
tion in Berlin, and 'the lost million' claimed by the 
French adventurers, with the yexed question of the 
extent of the obligations to France, the student will 
find a wide field for the gratification of curious research. 
I only allude to them, taking occasion to say, that no- 
where is to be found a more agreeable, and, so far as I 
am able to judge, trustworthy account of this portion 
of our annals than in Mr, Pitkin's neglected volumes. 
It is the era for which elementary instruction is least 
competent ; and one may hope, by the time the student 
has reached this point, he will know how to look for 
himself into the original documents and correspond- 
ence through which alone it is to be understood. If it 
be true that '•' the proper mode of judicially interpret- 
ing the Constitution is by reference to fixed and techni- 
cal rules sanctioned by the law; if in the appeal to the 
common law as a standard, in exposition of all doubts 
as to the meaning of such a Avritten instrument as the 
Constitution, there is safety, certainty, and authority ;" 
then more than ever is it important that the mind of 
the student — him who may, by-and-by, be the judicial 
expounder to apply these principles — should be im- 
bued Avith the spirit of the times when the Constitu- 
tion was made, and understand the necessities which 
forced it into existence. There is no better safeguard 
against extremes of construction than this actual his- 
tory of ' mischiefs to be remedied.' Here, too, as in 
all instances, may AVashington's familiar correspond- 
euce b;-^ studied. In his unpretending diary, kept 



AMERICAN UISTORT. 253 

during the session of tlie Federal Couvention, he notes 
that, on its adjournment, on receiving the papers 
from the secretary of tlie convention, he retired to his 
room to ' meditate' on the momentous work, which was 
then, for weal or woe, completed. And if the imagina- 
tion of the American student, invigorated by the pe- 
rusal of Washington's writings and by a true judgment 
of his character, can rise to communion with these 
solitary musings, he will better understand the true 
spirit of the Constitution than from the study of vol- 
umes of criticism. lie will then know what Washing- 
ton thought the framers of the Constitution meant it 
to be. If this be a fanciful craving not to be satisfied, 
he has at hand a practical exposition in Washington's 
administration, to which, at the close of this already 
too much protracted essay, and as a branch of neces- 
sary instruction, a passing remark is due. 

The Washington administration should be thoroughly 
and systematically studied, and, as a suitable intro- 
duction to it, the debates in the first Congress. They 
are more valuable than the debates — necessarily more 
speculative — in the Convention itself, because they are 
properly legislative discussions, the consultations of 
men striving to give an organized machine of govern- 
ment a proper direction — trying to make the Constitu- 
tion 'work.' The first ' administration' can be made 
matter of comparatively easy instruction. Its incidents 
are well defined. The first four years have peculiar 
domestic interest, whilst the end opens the new chap- 
ter in which our country, as a recognized independent 
community, came in contact and collision with foreign 
nations. How the frail and untried structure escaped 



ti54: AMONG MY BOOKS. 

the fearful whirlpool of European politics, at the 
French revolution, the student should be made tho- 
roughly to understand. If he does, his grateful vene- 
ration for the character of Washington mu3t be immea- 
surably increased. No other man could have held the 
helm steady in so fearful a strife of exaggerated sym- 
pathies and an tipathies. A foreign writer, less known 
than he should be among American scholars, has 
alluded to this influence of Washington in a passage 
of so much beauty that I cannot resist the temptation, 
misplaced as it may seem, here to quote it : 

" The conduct of Washington," says Professor Smith, 
of Cambridge, " indeed great in these moments, as in 
all the past, remains above all praise. He persuaded 
his country, — he enabled his country, to stand aloof 
from the unhappy storm of European politics; he 
resigned his popularity to accomplish so great an end, 
and he maintained the Constitution over which he 
presided, by severe and dignified confidence in its 
merits, and a calm exercise of its acknowledged powers 
and authority. He was insulted, — he was resisted in his 
own executive department, as the Chief Magistrate of 
America, by the French Ambassador. The labours 
of the press, the enthusiasm of the people, the intrigues 
of societies who voted themselves the guardians of 
American liberty, the natural sentiment of hatred to 
England — all Avere united against the temper and 
wisdom of Washington; but he rose superior to them 
all. He contented himself with steadily maintaining 
the principle of the law of nations and the regulation 
of his own government, and he then laid an able ex- 
position of his case before the French government, and 



AMERICAN HISTORY. 255 

calmly desired a recall of their ambassador. A new 
ambassador was sent from France ; the clouds grcAv 
lighter, the thunders rolled away, the horizon at length 
cleared up, discovering the President left in the same 
place aud attitude by the storm as when the storm 
had found him; but the countenances of all wise and 
good men were instantly turned upon him with the 
most animated smile of reverence and love." 

No American panegyrist could write of Washington 
more eloquently or with finer discrimination. If this 
be 'idolatry,' then, in spite of the Gnostics and Ebion- 
ites of our day of image-breaking, am I a worshipper! 



HENRY REED. 



On the moruiug of Wednesday, the 11th of October, 
1854, a heavy sorrow fell on this gay metropolis, and 
for once the pulse of money-getting and money-spend- 
ing stood still. Then, was received the news that one 
of the floating palaces of which this community was 
so proud, buoyed up by private patronage and public 
subsidy, had sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and with 
it, it was believed, nearly all the passengers. It was 
the day when the Arctic news readied us ; and when 
the fragmentary intelligence came slowly along that 
there were a few survivors, and we found Iioav few 
they were, the realization of the actual horror that 
not a woman or a child had been saved, was almost as 
overpoAvering as the first shock. Sixteen years have 
rolled by, and the sharpness of grief is dulled, but 
truly was it the saddest calamity and the darkest 
scandal which the history of peaceful navigation re- 
cords. The failure to devise some mode of rescue 
while the wounded ship was floating for hours on a 
perfectly smooth sea, is awful to think, upon. But 
the loss of the Arctic spread sorrow far beyond these 
local limits. It clouded homes elsewhere. In the 
siyter city of Philadelphia, a singularly sharp pang was 
inflicted when the honoured name which heads this 
last chapter of my rambling Notes was recorded among 



EENBY REED. 257 

those of the certain dead. There was a desperate 
search, if not for some trace, at least for some memory 
of him, in the crowd of victims, but it was in yain or 
nearly so. " The only survivor," says one of his family, 
writing soon after, "who was personally acquainted 
with Mr. Eeed, saw him about two o'clock (the collision 
was at noon, and at five all was over) sitting with his 
sister in the small passage aft of the dining-saloon. 
They were tranquil and silent, though their faces wore 
the look of painful anxiety. It is supposed they left 
this position and repaired to the promenade deck. 
For a selfish struggle for life, with a helpless com- 
panion dependent upon him, with a physical frame 
unsuited for such effort, and above all, with a senti- 
ment of religious resignation, which taught him in 
that hour of agony, even with the memories of his 
wife and children throngyig in his mind, to bow his 
head in submission to the will of God; — for such a 
struggle he was wholly unsuited; and his is the praise 
that he perished Avith the women and children." 

One other personal word, and I i:)ass to books. Mr. 
Eeed was in England in the interval between Thack- 
eray's first and second visit to this country. They had 
known each other here, and when the news of his 
death reached the old country, thus wrote Thackeray 
to a common friend in America. It has never been 
' published,' though in print. Reader, if there be one 
such who does not recognize already the gentle, sym- 
pathetic nature, pass this by too, for nothing will 
convince! It is dated at the old modest house, 36 
Onslow Square (in my eyes as classic as 39 Castle 
Street), on the 8th Kovember, 1854. 



258 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

" r have your melancholy letter this morning. I 
had heard of your sorrow, of course, and have kept 
back writing, knowing the powerlessness of consola- 
tion, and having, I don't know what, vague hopes that 
he might have been spared. That ghastly struggle 
over, who would pity any man that departs ? It is 
the survivor one commiserates of such a good, pious, 
tender-hearted man ^ he seemed whom God Almighty 
has just called back to himself. He seemed to me to 
have all the sweet domestic virtues which make the 
pang of parting only the more cruel to those who are 
left behind ; but that loss, what a gain to him ! A just 
man summoned to God, for what purpose can he go 
but to meet the Divine Love and Goodness ? I never 
think about deploring such ; and as you and I send 
for our childi'en, meaning them only love and kindness, 
how much more Pater Noster ? So we say, and weep 
the beloved whom we lose all the same with the 
natural, selfish sorrow, as you, I dare say, will have a 
heavy heart when your daughter marries and leaves 
you. You will lose her, though her new home is ever 
so happy. I remember quite weH my visit to his house 
in America; the pictures in his room, which made me 
see which way his thoughts lay; his sweet, gentle, 
melancholy, pious manner. That day I saw him here 
in Dover Street, I don't know whether I told him, but 
I felt at the time his very accents aflFected me somehow ; 
they were just American enough to be natural; and 
when shall I ever hear voices in the world that have 
spoken -more kindly to me? It was like being in 
grave, calm, kind, old Philadelphia over again, and 
behold ! now they are to be heard no more !....! 



HENRY REED. 259 

told him how I should like to be going with him in 
the Arctic, and Ave parted with a great deal of kindness, 
please God, and friendly talk of a future meeting. May 
it happen one day, for I feel sure he was a just man !" 

In nine years the hand that traced these gentle 
words was cold in death, and the Great Secret was 
known to both. 

There are many men now whose lives are devoted 
to letters, and not a few to that kind of literature 
which the French have an honest and expressive word 
for, and we none. 'Polite letters' is coxcombical — 
' Beautiful letters' sounds awkwardly, but, as applied 
to Poetry and Ehetoric proper, it is perfectly expres- 
sive. It was not so forty years ago. There were Pro- 
fessors of Classics, and History, and Moral Philosophy, 
with a divergence to Doctor Blair or Lord Kames, but 
a teacher of English literature, and a student who, like 
Henry Eeed, gave his whole life to it, for he left the 
bar and became a teacher at the age of twenty-three, 
were relatively rare. Even now, we sometimes import 
them. Of his modest, almost secluded life, little is 
known beyond the family circle and the city of his 
birth, and manhood (and that city not very loyal to its 
own), and the result is that the literary materials 
which he left behind, though promptly published and 
as carefully edited and annotated as the circumstances 
permitted, while they are the precious gems of many a 
discriminating student's library, have not had the ex- 
tensive circulation they deserve. English booksellers 
greedily * pirated' them, as in the present disgraceful 
state of the law they had a perfect right to do, even 
though, as here, the sufferers were the widow and 



260 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

fatherless. One meets them in odd, out of the way 
places. Corning and Cornell and Schenectady do not 
use them. But less ambitious seminaries of learning, 
— quiet, retired schools, — do. In the Southern colleges, 
at the University of Virginia, and, I believe, at Wash- 
ington, or, as it is now called, Washington-Lee College 
(the Rockbridge ' Liberty-Hall Academy' of Washing- 
ton's will, — the house where Lee's last gentle hours 
were passed), one finds them, for Henry Eeed left be- 
hind him no recorded word, as in his gentle heart he 
had no emotion, of unkindness or sectional animosity. 
Fanaticism was no part of his nature. He never 
stained literature with j)olitics. I have lately found 
Professor Reed's lectures used as a text-book in one of 
the largest Roman Catholic colleges in the neighbour- 
hood of New York, and this though he was and was 
known to be a staunch and devout Churchman of the 
Anglican communion in its best and most conserva- 
tive and moderate day*. It was repugnant to his truly 
catholic 'nature to allow the pure, spring-like well of . 
literary meditations and utterances to be .darkened 
and poisoned by sectarianism. No word of intolerance 
disfigures his pages, and if there be any decided ex- 
pressions in any way or to any extent adverse, they 
were in a different direction than toward that of the 
Ancient Church. Anglican schools, such as that model 
one guided by an accomplished lady, of St. Agnes 
near Albany, make them text-books, and the copy 
now before me, well thumbed and marked by th« 
judicious pencil, is that of a Congregational clergyman 
of the straite^ Protestantism, but whose gentle nature 
and refined taste finds everything congenial here. 



HENRY REED. 261 

It has been said that the uon-user of Mr. Seed's 
books is owing to their not being systematic — that is, 
not constituting a single vohime or a series of element- 
ary instructions in English literature. Their merits, 
it seems to me, is their being just the very reverse of 
this. They do cover, in one way or another, the whole 
course of the poetical literature of our mother tongue 
from Chaucer to Tennyson, but they are oral teachings 
— almost conversational utterances. These lectures are 
what, night after night, he said to his class, and as he 
said it. .They were all written out, but they were 
fresh, and the reflex of a rich mind. He often did not 
finish a lecture till a few hours or minutes before he 
began to deliver it, and, after his death, they we're 
printed exactly as he wrote them and left them. This 
is their especial charm. Literature, especially poetic 
literature, was part of Henry Keed's nature — inter- 
woven with the chords 'of his being. It was always 
present, and yet there was, in common intercourse, 
less of the pedant, or what is often synonymous, of the 
professor, than any human being I ever knew. Note, 
for example, how literary illustrations were always 
brightening up around him. 

In one of his Lectures on Early English Literature 
is this passage in reference to Chaucer's 'House of 
Fame:' "It contains a passage which has struck me 
as in curious anticipation of a scientific hypothesis 
suggested in our own days ; poetic imagination fore- 
shadowing the results of scientific reasoning. In the 
ninth Bridgewater Treatise from the pen of Mr. Bab- 
bage, he propounded a theory respecting the perma- 
nent impressions of our words — spoken words — a 



262 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

theory startling enough almost to close a man's lips in 
perpetual silence : That the pulsations of the air, 
once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to 
exist with the sounds to which they give rise ; that the 
waves of the air thus raised perambulate the earth and 
ocean's surface ; and soon every atom of its atmosphere 
takes up the altered movement, due to the infinitesi- 
mal portion of the primitive motion which has been 
conveyed to it through countless channels and which 
must continue to influence its paths through its future 
existence. 'Every atom,' says the philosopher, 'im- 
pressed with good and with ill, retains at once the 
motions which philosophers and sages have imparted 
to it, mixed and combined, in ten thousand ways, with 

all that is worthless and base The atmosphere we 

breathe is the ever living witness of the sentiments we 

have uttered and (in another state of being) the 

offender may hear still vibrating in his ear the very 
words, uttered perhaps thousands of centuries before, 
which at once caused and registered his own condem- 
nation.' 

" Now I have no thought," says Mr. Eeed, " of inti- 
mating, in the most remote degree, that m this remark- 
able train of thought Mr. Babbage was under obliga- 
tions to Chaucer. The passage has an air of absolute 
originality ; and, besides, the writer of it is too strong- 
minded and manly to allow such obligations, if they 
existed, to pass unacknowledged. I have no sympathy 
with the spirit which delights in detecting plagiarisms 
in the casual and innocent coincidences which every 
student knows are frequently occurring. That there 



HENRY REED. ' 263 

is svich a coincideuce worthy of notice, will be seen in 
these lines in ' The House of Fame :' 

' Sound is nought but air that's broken, 
And every speeche tiiat is spoken, 
Whe'er loud or low, foul or fair, 
In his substance is but air : 
For as flame is but lighted smoke, 
Eight so is sound but air that's broke ; 
Eke when that men harpstrings smite. 
Whether that be much or lite, — 
Lo ! with the stroke the air it breaketh ; 
Thus wot'st thou well what thing is speeche. 
Now henceforth I will thee teach 
However each speeche, voice or soun', 
Through his multiplicacion. 
Though it were pij^ed of a mouse. 
Must needs come to Fame's House.- 
I prove it thus : taketh heed now 
By experience, for if that thou 
Throw in a water now a stone 
Well wot'st thou it will make anon 
A little rounded as p. circle. 
Par venture as broad as a coreicle, 
And right anon tbou shalt see well 
That circle cause (vpother wheel. 
And that the third, and so forth, bother, 
Every circle causing other, 
Much broader than himselfen was, — 
Right so of «jv, my live brother, 
Ever eact air another stirreth, 
More and more and speecli up bcareth 
Till it be at the ' House of Fame.' * 

It so happened that, on his English pilgrimage, in 
1854, Mr. Reed made the personal acquaintance of Sir 
Charles Babbage, and in a letter to a friend at home 



264 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

he thus describes the use he happened to be able to 
make of this recollection : 

"I told him that I had once in a lecture quoted 
from his Bridgewater Treatise, that startling passage 
about the perpetuity of sound — and that some of my 
audience used to say that it almost made them afraid 
for some days to speak, from the dread that the sounds 
were to last and mayhap come back to them in the 
hereafter ; on telling him I had cited the passage in a 
literary connection — a curious parallelism with a 
description in Chaucer, he expressed a good deal of 
surprise and asked me to refer him to it; this led on 
to some brilliant talking on his part : he said he had 
been asked why he had not used light as an illustra- 
tion of the subject as well as sound — that he had not 
done so, because it would serve the purpose less effect- 
ively for the general reader : he told me that there was 
a little work so generally attributed to him that it 
might be asked for at the publisher's as Mr. Babbage's 
religious pamphlet on light, etc., — he spoke well of it, 
but did not appear to know the writer — (are you 
acquainted with it?) He told me that Sir John Her- 
schel mentioned to him that Sir William Hamilton 
one day, as they were walking together, said — ' Would 
you not like to see some great battle of ancient times 
— say Marathon or Actium ?' 'Yes, but how is it to be 
done?' 'Well, if one could travel away from the 
earth with a velocity exceeding that of light, he would 
at last be able to look back on the waves of light first 
set in motion by the battle and so get a good sight of it.' " 

It was in this letter that there is a reference of some 
interest, not to the Byron 'scandal,' which was only 



HENRY BEED. 265 

to be breathed into female ears, and to be repeated by 
a woman's tongue, but to the sorrows of the Byron 
family : 

"After he got up to go, by some chance of conver- 
sation the late Lady Lovelace's name (Lord Byron's 
daughter 'Ada') was mentioned; he knew her inti- 
mately, and spoke highly of her mathematical powers, 
and of her peculiar capability — higher, he said, than 
of any one he knew — to prepare (I believe it was) the 
descriptions connected with his calculating machine 
(I fear I am not expressing myself rightly here as to 
the precise nature of the subject he mentioned). He 
described her as utterly unimaginative, biit it was the 
recollection of her miserable life — he spoke of it as a 
tragedy — that seemed to sadden him for the while, as 
he recurred to it, speaking in a lower tone of voice 
and with a manner so subdued that as I stood listen- 
ing to him, I could scarce believe he was the same 
nervously-mannered gentleman who had entered the 
room an hour Ijefore ; there was so much feeling in 
both his words and manner that I did not feel at 
liberty to question him as to the precise nature of the 
unhappiness of the life he was speaking of and its* 
tragic termination — he used some phrase of that kind, 
which led us to think of its having ended with suicide 
— though I believe this was not the fact. I gathered 
that 'Ada' had a good deal of the Byron devil in her, 
and that having made an uncongenial match with 
Lord Lovelace, she cordially disliked him, and that 
she had also no better feeling for her own mother. It 
seems to have been a case of triple antipathy between 
the wife, and husband, and mother." 

13 



266 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

The subjects of Professor Seed's Lectures are : Eng- 
lish Literature arranged according to centuries and 
subjects; English Poetry, being a serial criticism upon 
■ the principal poets from Chaucer to Tennyson ; Eng- 
lish History, as illustrated by poetry in the plays of 
Shakespeare, from legendary Lear to Henry VIII. — 
from Cordelia to Aune Boleyu. The complete series, 
regarding it as 'oue work, and such it really is, has 
but one aim — the purpose and power of the imagina- 
tion as a teacher of historic, poetic, and religious 
truth. These lectures were written in what may be 
termed a transition state of public taste. Mr. Reed 
was old enough to have lived through that season in 
which the school of Byron and Shelley was in the 
ascendant, and he began to teach and write at a 
moment when a purer, and, to him, more congenial 
influence was beginning to be felt. His poetic idol, 
strictly speaking, was Wordsworth ; and even without 
sharing in all his enthusiasm on this head, one can 
easily understand how the shrine was Erected and how 
the worship began. He had faith in Wordsworth and 
his school, because he thought that, with their advent, 
there came a spirit, not of tumultuous passion, but of 
earnestness, and pure and high poetic philosophy. For 
a long period (it was so in my boyhood) poetry had 
been regarded as perhaps the most harmless indul- 
gence of the young and idle and sentimental, to be 
copied into albums, to be pasted into scrap-books, to' 
be sung, to be recited, to be quoted, to be anything 
but studied. Mr. Reed's theory (rather an exclusive 
onej|,but still his) was, that in the expression of the 
highest poetical excellence there was a long void from 



HENRY REED. 267 

Miltou to Wordsworth — from 'Paradise Lost' to the 
' Excursion.' He thought that from Charles 11. and 
his revellers, John Dryden leading them — through 
the reign of Queen Anne, with Pope (to whom he 
hardly did justice as an artist) and Swift and Parnell 
— and the Hanoverian reigns, down to the end of 
George III.'s, there was no high, earnest, imaginative 
power; but that frivolity and sentimentalism in poetic 
art naturally brooded on the cold pool of infidelity 
beneath — that it was the long reign of false gods, and 
that -Wordsworth and his reforming, earnest followers 
were the Iconoclasts who were to break down the 
images. Mr. Reed, thinking that in his day he had 
seen this victory of the pure over the impure, the good 
over the bad, the genuine over the spurious, began, in 
the glow of theoretic enthusiasm, to teach and expound 
his views of the power and purpose of the imagination. 
On these high principles of criticism Professor Reed 
taught, and he taught with an earnestness of tone 
that no one can easily resist. 

Among these books, if called on to select the 
one which is most original and attractive, I should 
choose the Lectures on English History from the dim 
period of legendary story down to tlie Reformation — 
from King Lear to Henry VIII., — all illustrated by 
Shakespeare. So far as I know, this use of the great 
dramatist is purely original, though I have a grave 
suspicion that if the truth we're honestly confessed, 
more have studied English history in Shakespeare 
than anywhere else. The idea was the realization of 
the Baconian apothegm : "Dramatica est veluti specta- 
lilis : nam. constituit imaginem veram tanquam pi'e- 



268 AMONG MT BOOKS. 

sentium: Historia, autem, tanquam prmteriiarwnP 
This, he says, was the text of these lectures ; and, as 
it seems to me, — a partial judge, — beautifully is it 
evolved and illustrated. 

And strange as it may at first sight seem, the most 
attractive and thoughtful of the course are the two 
lectures where he had fewest authentic facts to deal 
with, and which treat of individuals purely fictitious, 
and of times on which the darkest cloud of mystery 
rests — the legendary Britain of Lear and the Roman 
period of Cymbeline. In the first, is an appeal for the 
fatherland, as against what may be termed the Latin- • 
Mediterranean monopoly, which anticipates Tennyson. 
The passages are too long to quote, and (to my mind) 
too perfect to be mutilated ; but if he or she who 
kindly reads these words of comment will take the 
trouble to look at the text, what is said in praise will 
not be found fault with. So with the Cymbeline lec- 
ture, — though here the materials are more abundant ; 
it is a noble sketch of the incipient struggle between 
the South and North — the Latin and the Teuton — 
from the time when, as Arnold somewhere says, " The 
Roman colonies on the banks of the Rhine and the 
Danube looked out on the country beyond those 
rivers as Ave look up to the stars and see with our 
eyes worlds of which we know nothing," down to the 
dark days when the conflict began, and Rome was 
w^orsted — from Marius'and the Cimbri through all the 
alternations of the Augustan period, down to the hour 
when 'Northern barbarians soUglit tlie plunder of the 
temple of Apollo,' and 'many a gallant Goth lay 
buried l^eneath the rocks of Delphi.' 



HENRT REED. 269 

Among the Augustan annals there is no sadder or 
more dramatic page — and Mr. Reed so regards it — 
than the moaning of the Emperor, in the palace of the 
Caesars, for his lost Varian legions. It is not a whine 
from Wilhelmshohe, but a truly imperial wail. "Per 
contimios menses, harhd cajnllo que submisso, caput in- 
terdum foribus illideret, vociferans 'QuinMli Vare, 
legiones redde !' " And then hoAv grandly solemn was 
the scene when, years after, "amid the silence and 
gloom of the Forest of Teiitoberg, Germanicus and his 
army discovered the rusting fragments of Eoman wea- 
pons and the bleaching bones of the slaughtered sol- 
diers of Varus." And here it is that memory suggests 
a parallelism in our own homely story, to which I 
refer with entire confidence as to the fact, but some 
hesitation as to details, for the authority on which I 
give it has escaped my memory. When, years after 
the defeat of Braddock's army in the forests of the 
Monongahela, a victorious British army advanced on 
Fort Duquesne by the same route, they came, as did 
the soldiers of Drusus, to the scene of sorrow, and 
there they -found and recognized the unburied bones 
of their countrymen. It was actual recognition, too, for 
the body of a dead brother, bearing a soldierly name 
(from the days of Braddock to Wellington), Major 
Halket was recognized (the anti-climax is more ap- 
parent than real) by the gold filling of a tooth. 

Let not the reader imagine for one moment that 
sombre or undue gravity characterizes Mr. Reed's 
literary works. He was in all respects genial, and 
with a rare and refined sense of humour which is con- 
stantly revealing itself. This is very marked through- 



270 AMONG MY BOOKS. 

out the Lecture on the 'Literature of Wit cand Hu- 
mour,' in the First Course — to one manifestation of 
which, of some local interest, I venture in conclusion 
to refer. " The most remarkable instance of obtuse- 
ness to light letters that I ever met with occurred in 
another region. Goeller, a German editor of Thucy- 
dides, in annotating a passage of the Greek historian, 
describing the violence of the Athenian factions, gives 
two modern illustrations : one of the Guelf and Ghibe- 
line parties in Italy; the "other — citiug Washington 
Irving and his book very gravely in Latin — the fac- 
tions of the long pipes and short pipes in New York, 
under the administration of Peter Stuyvesant. Im- 
agine the erudite and ponderous German poring over 
Knickerbocker as seriously as over Guicciardini !" 
This instance of simplicity has a droll, effect in the 
original, printed at Leipsic in 1836: " Addo locum 
Washingtonis Irvingii, Hist. Novi Eloraci., lib. vii. 
cap. V." 

The enthusiasm — venial I hope — as to these charm- 
ing books, almost lost sight, of in the vast alluvies of 
print that is rushing by us, I can hardly hope to im- 
part to others; but I cannot better close these ram- 
bling notes — too much prolonged, but most indul- 
gently tolerated — than by this tribute to one so dearly 
loved, so sincerely mourned. 

And now, readers, who have been my kind com- 
panions for more than a year — Farewell ! The familiar 
books are long ago scattered, and nothing is left but 
their fast-fading memories. 



]RXJ:BILiIO.^TIOISrS 



OF 



Wliolesale Booksellers anil StatioEers 

17 M^irray Street, Ne^v York. 



NORTH CAROLINA LAW REPORTS. retail 

PRICES. 

Haywood's Reports, Vol. 1, $7 00 

Martin & 2d Haywood, 7 00 

Taylor & Conference, 7 00 

Law^ Repository and Term, . . . . . 8 50 

Murphy, Vol. 3, . . 7 50 

Hawks, Vol. 2, . 7 50 

Hawks, Vol. 3, 5 50 

Hawks, Vol. 4, 7 50 

Devereux's Law, Vol. 1, 6 50 

" 'Equity, 2 vols., 15 00 

Devereux & Battle's Law, Vols. 1 and 2, each, • 7 50 

Devereux & Battle's Equity, 2 vols., . . , 15 00 

Iredell's Law, Vol. 5, 8 50 

" " Vols. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, each, . . 7 50 

« "• Vol. 12, 5 50 

» « Vol. 13, ■ 7 .50 

" Equity, Vols. 4 and 5, each, ... 6 50 

« « Vol. 6, 7 50 

" " Vols. 7 and 8, each, 5 00 

Busbee's Law, 6 00 

Busbee's Equity, . . . . ... . . 4 00 

Jones's Law, Vol. 1, 7 50 

« « Vol. 2, 6 00 

« « Vols. 3, 4, and 5, each, 6 50 

«« « Vols. 6 and 7, each, .... 7 50 

« « Vol. 8, . 7 00 



PUBLICATIONS OF EDWARD J. HALE & SON. 

RETAIL PRICIiS. 

Jones's Equity, Vol. 1, $4 50 

" " Vols. 2 and 3, each, .... 6 50. 

" " Vols. 4 and 5, 5 50 

« « Vol. 6, 7 00 

Winston's Iiaxtr, . 6 50 

" Equity, 4 50 

Phillips's Law, 6 50 

" Equity, 4 50 

" Reports, Vol. 63, 7 50 

" » Vol. 64, 8 00 

Battle's Digest, 3 vols., 20 00 



The Comet ; or, The Earth in its Varied Phases, Past, 
Present, and Future. 1 vol., 12mo, illustrated. - - $2.25 
From some of the notices of the Press, we extract as follows : 

"A really wonderful book. * * * Teems with information for all 
classes of persons — men of science, men of business, clergymen, 
lawyers, engineers, mechanics, tradesmen, farmers," etc, 

"It is a remarkable book, original and interesting." 

" It is very seldom, in these days of mere reiteration and reproduction, 
that so .able, striking and original a book as this is found riding above 
the surface of ordinary current literature." 

Dabney's Defence of Virginia and of the South. By Pro- 
fessor R. L. Dabncy, D.D., of Vir<;inia. 12mo. - - - $1.50 

" This modest volume might rather have been entitled ' The Vindication 
of Truth crushed under the heel of rampant Fanaticism.' * * * The 
style and spirit of many portions of this volume will remind classical 
scholars of some of the most characteristic chapters of Tacitus." 

" One of the ablest thinkers of this country." 

Life of Gen. (Stonewall) Jackson. By Professor R. L. Dab- 
ncy, D.D. 1 vol., 8vo. Cloth, $3.00 ; half calf^ - - $4.00 
Of this -work upwards of 50,000 copies have been sold. 

Diary of a Southern Refugee, during the War. By a Lady 
of Virginia. 2d edition. 

" A work.unpretending in its character, but of rare literary merit, and of 
the deepest interest. * * * Its style is animated, graceful, and chaste. 
Its simple pathos is most touching, and without an eflbrt to be moving 
or eloquent, the outgushing warmth of the narrative brings tears from 
every reader not entirely destitute of sensibility." 

Hawks's History of North Carolina. By Rev. Francis L. 
Hawks, D.D., LL.D. 2 vols. Svo. Cloth, $5.00; sheep, $6.00 j 
half calf, $7.00. 

Avif of the above sent by mail, post-paid, 07i receipt of price. 



5»^^ 
















3> ^ !ar 






. ■> > : 

■' It' J? " 
> -^-^ 



If 



-^^ ->>■> -^B» ^- > 

, ,>J>..>J>^^ >:J> ] 



^i,4^.,i...j4..^-..\.^i.xii.i4iiM^j.,MiiJ'i^mmmHtasmmmmmmmfi^mm-x4uu „u,m,m."B 





